71–80 of 135 posts
> Without good culture, everything else won’t work well Except the market is full of proof this isn't true. You can still do very well with a broken culture if you have an oligopoly, through tactics like vendor lock-in, by buying up upstart competition early, using VC funding to capture the market by selling below cost, etc. And now that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been laid off from high-paying…
I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years. As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.
This might just be hanlon's razor and I'm overthinking it, but part of me wonders if it's less "executives don't get it" and more "executives do not want to get it".
It quotes a problematic statement and then after one or two paragraphs, it says this:
> But here is an important thing that many people forget:
> There is no better productivity hack than a great culture. No AI tools will provide bigger productivity gains.
> I’ve unfortunately seen and heard this sentence quite a few times, either directly or from an engineer or engineering leader who has reported that to me.
So the problematic sentence is the one that talks about a great culture being the biggest productivity hack? I had to scroll up again and see what it was referring to.
I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left. But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random bl…
> Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism? The CEO (or at least the founder) created and cultivated the culture of the company thus far. If the culture is bad, they are the single largest reason why. You are right in that execs won't seek out the blog article which criticizes their strategy... unless they actually want to steelman against th…
[for companies with idk 100 or less headcount] Good culture boils down to: 1. Predictability. Flavors of it: deliver features on time, roadmap stays mostly stable, on demand requests are known about ahead of time, business struggling or doing well transparent, tech debt / upkeep are first class citizens of planned work. All of this is project management and communication. 2. Org pays market rate and has good benefits…
This is so important. One of the things that kills company culture before the company even takes off is getting a sense from the founders that they're just trying to fool desperate/clueless people into working for them for less than what they're worth.
The startups that actually succeed have the philosophy "find the best people and pay them a lot". All the successful unicorns and decacorns over the last 15 years have a reputation of paying people well. There is literally not one startup I can think of that succeeded but has a reputation of underpaying.
And if you're unable to pay employees well then you're simply not well-capitalized enough and should drop the project.
I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years. As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.
I've seen managers in my career bend over backward to protect people who were outright abusive to their coworkers but were individually very productive. Those managers didn't go very far. Your team is not a car collection.
> Without good culture, everything else won’t work well Except the market is full of proof this isn't true. You can still do very well with a broken culture if you have an oligopoly, through tactics like vendor lock-in, by buying up upstart competition early, using VC funding to capture the market by selling below cost, etc. And now that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been laid off from high-paying…
You're listing examples where there is no market
Search, social media, key SaaS markets, healthcare, insurance, etc.
I feel like this and all the AI productivity things could be boiled down to one simple rule: AI just amplifies whatever you already have.
I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years. As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
Went from IPO hopeful to struggling to position to sell the company now that it was obviously down-trending. Everyone else worth their salt left within a year. Biggest takeaway was how effective everyone was despite not having a traditionally strong engineering background, just because everything traveled so fast because everyone knew everything about the product and everyone was happy and eager to talk to one another, and how quickly that disappeared.