7 ms·

No Shenanigans

• josh33 7y ago
  Helped form these at my former company, so I'm biased. But the memorability and thoughtful definitions really helped these stick (to this day): https://www.entrata.com/company/values https://www.entrata.com/company/values
• dcu 7y ago
  The Twilio API includes a X-Shenanigans header on every request, always set to "none", of course :) > $ curl -I https://api.twilio.com https://api.twilio.com
  • fb03 7y ago
    they even cared to use a proper X-<> "custom header", respecting the rfc heh. Nice.
    • steveklabnik 7y ago
      That pattern was deprecated 7 years ago https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648
    • nodesocket 7y ago
      X- should not be used. Just name your custom header keys something reasonable ovoid conflict with established standards. X-Ice-Cream: true Should just be: Ice-Cream: true
• lonelappde 7y ago
  aka "Don't Be Evil"
  • layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
    We all knew how that ended up..
    • drad 7y ago
      Its all about your perspective. If I bought 100k worth of $50 stock and it went to $5000 per share and this company decided to come clean and admit their devious (but not evil) plan and the stock went to $25/share I'd consider that evil...not the $5000/share value they made off of selling 'ads'.
      • yowlingcat 7y ago
        Shouldn't their value have been "Get money" then? That seems to describe what you're saying.
• debt 7y ago
  I've always wondered: what's the purpose of company values? I genuinely don't know.
  • a-priori 7y ago
    I've worked at two companies that have a definite set of values: Amazon and Shopify. In both companies the values serve two purposes. In decision-making, they act as something you can point at when you weigh choices. And in performance evaluations, they act as something you can point at to say that you or other people demonstrated certain values. In this way they act as a norming force to keep everyone in a large company aligned on how decisions should be made and what behaviours are considered good. One of the biggest challenges a large organization faces is keeping all its parts aligned, and a specific set of values helps with that.
  • gorgoiler 7y ago
    Most groups in life have shared values. Your church, school, nation, family, swim team, supper club, condo parking lot etc. all have some mix of implicit or explicit values if you look hard enough for them. Some are soft, some are hard. “Fair play” and “equality” are very common ones, which overlap mostly with “No Shenanigans” in this example. The purpose of values is to codify acceptable behavior, and promote a nurturing environment. “Provide exemplary HTTP endpoint documentation“ would be a bit more Twilio specific, but the ethos of the shared value itself is a common one. It’s a pity that in the 21st century the only values agreements most post education adults enter into are the ones with their employer, but we live in a very individualist society.
  • carls 7y ago
    I think it depends on whose perspective you're asking for. I think from an employee perspective, seeing leaders talk about squishy things like "company values" can feel hokey and gimmicky. After all, even Enron had plaques hanging in their headquarters about their values. So are values just the sort of snake-oil marketing buzzwords you use to sell how great and "innovative" your organization to investors and prospective employees (e.g. WeWork)? I certainly think that this is true to some extent for most companies. At the same time I also think they're really important for founders/leaders to articulate and stick with. It explicitly formalizes a set of moral norms, behavioral patterns and ideologies you want those who are part of your company to abide by. They're pithy shorthands for verbally and explicitly describing your company's aspirational culture to others who are not part of it. I think a lot of us feel disgruntled and frustrated when leaders profess one set of values, and seem to live by another. I think many of us would prefer to work for a company where the values aren't explicitly stated, but they're followed than for a company where the reverse is true (e.g. Enron). At it's core, I think having a set of company values is basically having a list of aspirational behavioral norms that you have agreed to collectively prioritize. It allows people to check people's decisions against these norms (e.g. "Hey, I think you're doing something sneaky that makes our company look good to prospective clients, but I think it's important we respect our value of 'No Shenanigans.'"), and also make decisions (e.g. "One thing we value is to 'Not Settle'. Are we settling in this product decision?"). Done well, it can be really motivating and purposeful. Done hypocritically or inconsistently, it just feels like another marketing gimmick that big companies do.
• codeulike 7y ago
  Company Values are generally a bunch of nice things and you look at them and think well yes thats nice. A more interesting question, I think, is what other Values (that didn't make the list) the Company is prepared to let slide in order to achieve the official ones that did make the list. If you are optimising for some specific set of values, that must mean you are prepared to let other unnamed ones slide a little. e.g. to achieve 'Kindness' you might need to let 'Consistency' slide, and so on. So what Values is a company not prioritising? Thats a much more interesting discussion. edit: Lets have a worked example, make this a bit more concrete. Lets say Organisation X is a community interest company and has the following values: * Leadership * Excellence * Collaboration * Integrity * Commitment What a lovely bunch of values. Who wouldn't want to adopt those? But whats more interesting to think about is "what are they prepared to compromise to achieve those values?": e.g. if Commitment is an important value, does that mean Flexibility is not valued so much? Because surely if you are committed, you lose flexibility. Or if Collaboration is an important value, does that mean 'Delivering things on time' is less valued? Because collaborating with everybody takes time to organise.
  • lb1lf 7y ago
    -Years ago, I spent a couple of weeks offshore on a vessel on which the owners had stencilled on the aft superstructure 'SAFETY FIRST' in 5ft tall letters. Beneath this slogan, some witty soul had stencilled 'SECOND ONLY TO PROFIT' in a slightly smaller font.
  • patjenk 7y ago
    If you're willing to let a value slide, its not a value. Values should be things you're willing to stick to even when it hurts you. I think that misunderstanding/lie is the problem with most "values" list.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • nostrademons 7y ago
      But that's the point - where are you willing to be hurt? That's a more interesting question than what you are ostensibly willing to stick to, and much more revealing about the organization's culture. Everybody wants all the nice things, but what really reveals your values is when you want two nice things that are contradictory - which do you choose? That's why Facebook's "Move fast and break things" is so powerful (and so revealing) as a value statement, as it showed that Facebook was willing to break any number of things to move fast. Google's "Don't be evil", as words, is utterly useless, because nobody considers themselves evil. Google shutting down their consumer-facing site so that they could honor the terms of their AOL deal, however, spoke huge volumes, as did them pulling out of China in 2010 regardless of the cost to their market. Similarly, them going back into China regardless of privacy and human rights violations also speaks volumes.
• callumprentice 7y ago
  Our company values are captured in our "Tao of Linden" - https://www.lindenlab.com/about https://www.lindenlab.com/about They've changed a bit in the 15 years I've been there but happy to say we still try to live by them today.
• thinkingkong 7y ago
  Its usually a failing of the business to not communicate it better but values are one of the inputs to create the culture you want at a company. The best version of this Ive heard is that “culture is the right people living their values”. Done well, it makes it easy for people to hold themselves and each other accountable. It makes hiring easier, sets tone for communications, branding, etc. Its super important for it to be explicitly stated. The difference amongst companies not explicitly stating their values and ones who “wander” is documented.
• seph-reed 7y ago
  I'd really like to make a service that's like a fail-safe for company values. Something like: The CEO/management puts half (or more) of their salary into some account, and at the end of every month the employees decide whether or not the company is going by its values. If not, certain charities which represent those values are given the money.
• lostdog 7y ago
  Values are levers for a group of concepts. You can hook that lever up to teamwork or frugality or toe-stepping, and suddenly it's easier to inject these concepts into any discussion throughout the company. Of course, who gets to pull these levers and when is a completely separate issue. As usual it's up to the leadership whether any values are used in a healthy or unhealthy way. Does frugality apply when an employee wants an ergonomic keyboard, or when a VIP flies business class? Does be-humble apply when negotiating compensation or to the CEO's vision? Amazon, for example, is famous for weaponizing frugality and disagree-and-commit against lower level employees. At $OldJob I got to watch a director pull the move-fast lever whenever his team wanted to ship, and the safety-first lever for other teams. Written values can't really be good vs bad. They are more like a tool, and will be used for good or evil depending on who is operating them.
• john-radio 7y ago
  > draw the owl "The rest of the fucking owl" is a meme about laughably incomplete instructions, in case you didn't catch the reference: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1272765-how-to-draw-an-owl https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1272765-how-to-draw-an-owl "Draw the owl" is a pretty ironic rule, because it's horribly incomplete itself unless you're familiar with that particular meme. I wonder how many people work at Twilio who have heard "draw the owl," and know it has something to do with being consistent, but has no idea what it means or why it seems to be clear to everyone else?
  • lincolnq 7y ago
    Usually with company values you don't just give them to somebody once and never talk about them again -- you repeat them over and over again in company meetings, with lots of examples and associated lore. Most values can't really be properly interpreted without context. Fred has taken these values out of context for the purpose of the blog post. (Not disagreeing with you that this value absolutely needs more context than most, though!)
  • kelnos 7y ago
    I've been at Twilio for 8 years; explaining what "draw the owl" means and where it comes from has been part of onboarding at least that long.
  • blahblahthrow 7y ago
    I work at a place that also has "draw the owl" as a kind of corporate culture joke? It's funny at small scale when everything is uncertain, but when you grow to a thousand employees it kind of turns into an embarrassment. We have kind of moved away from it officially AFAICT so now it's more of an inside joke that old-timers use to assert dominance
• draw_down 7y ago
  I like something from the Netflix culture slide deck (circa 2009). It says that company values are not what's written in a doc like this, or on a plaque on the wall. Those are what the company would like the values to be. Company values are what really happens, day in and day out. Hopefully the two align; in many cases they don't.
• Fellshard 7y ago
  This subject and the utter vagueness of the values presented here require me to bring up Bryan Cantrill's talk, 'Principles of Technology Leadership'.[1] He gives Amazon a lambasting over their core principles, and Uber even moreso. It's both funny and sobering to examine how what seems like a useful and valuable foundation ends up being flimsy and easy to ignore when made vague enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc
• emptybits 7y ago
  I've always enjoyed the word shenanigans yet I've never known where or how it originated. Rabbit hole. Merriam-Webster tells us: The history of shenanigan is as tricky and mischievous as its meaning. Etymologists have some theories about its origins, but no one has been able to prove them. All we can say for certain is that the earliest known use of the word in print appeared in the April 25, 1855, issue of San Francisco's Town Talk. Although the "underhanded trick" sense of the word is oldest, the most common senses in use now are "tricky or questionable practices" (as in "political shenanigans") and "high-spirited behavior" (as in "youthful shenanigans").[1] First use in 1855. Cool. I wondered what that first context was. So I used the site Chronicling America to find the April 25th, 1855 issue of Town Talk. But along the way I found earlier uses in the August 18th, 1854 issue of the Nevada Journal[2] and February 3rd, 1855 issue of the Sierra Citizen.[3] I still don't have the definitive etymological answer but what the web allows a layperson to usefully research in 2019 is astounding! [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shenanigan https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shenanigan [2] https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026884/1854-08-18/ed-1/seq-1/ https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026884/1854-08-1... [3] https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058097/1855-02-03/ed-1/seq-3/#date1=1789&index=0&rows=20&words=Shenanigan&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1855&proxtext=shenanigans&y=12&x=17&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1 https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058097/1855-02-0...
• brunoTbear 7y ago
  I worked at a startup that structured their values to be explicit tradeoffs between two equally valid choices generally, but where one choice was more valid for the startup. For example, we held something to the effect of "We value open disagreement and direct communication more than harmonious relations" This was a great value: the company needed to have tight OODA loops and that did not permit beating around the bush. People had differences of opinion and they needed to be able to express them and come to conclusions. In other orgs it could have been valid to have a get-along attitude if things were more important to keep steady (a successful and functioning business unit, for example, might prefer to keep going steadily without rocking the boat). At the same time, the company also said "We value thinking things through from first principles rather than re-applying what has already been done elsewhere." This meant you couldn't justify a decision on "well we did it that way at company x", you had to have a good reason to do something a certain way. This cost us time (unlike the previous value) because decisions or designs could be challenged for not having a good justification. The upside was that it led (I think) to better designs, and encouraged people to debate bad decisions before making them. We didn't have any values that looked like "honesty" or "excellence". That was nice.
• jonahbenton 7y ago
  Remarkable that this druck is ranked on HN alongside news of Facebook's latest garbage shenanigan but very successful ploy, and Strategery's analysis of Google's latest garbage shenanigan yet very successful ploy.