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> It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Sure, same here. W

> It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Sure, same here. What I don't understand is the idea that such pervasive mendacity and self-delusion should acceptably characterize a kind of culture that anyone is expected to regard as worthy of respect. I realize it has a lot to do with the difference between organizational desiderata and organizational incentives, or put otherwise between asserted and revealed preference. Still, this is a problem in design susceptible to methods of analysis and adjustment recognizably derived as much from engineering as sociology, and it is not a novel field; I first learned of it from books published in the 1960s. The regression in ambient knowledge since then is remarkable, not to say shocking.

jcgrillo 2y ago
I think it's thematically consistent with the lack of rigor in this field. I've been told countless times to deliver provably broken, bug-ridden shit on the premise that "it's better to deliver quickly and iterate". Similarly, I've gotten the management stink-eye from discovering (and proving by fixing it) something that was running totally broken in production for years. When nothing matters, that is when companies can get away with producing garbage, the way they go about producing it also degrades. So I'd say the amount of attention and rigor applied to values and management principles is roughly commensurate with the amount of attention and rigor applied to product and engineering concerns. That is to say, just barely enough to get by. Yet somehow we print money...
- throwanem 2y ago
  Because that's what it's come to be about. We aren't here to serve our users, our bosses or each other. We are here to serve money and personal ambition, with "meritocracy" inhering solely in whether one serves one's own ambition or another's. Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.

jcgrillo 2y ago

I think it's thematically consistent with the lack of rigor in this field. I've been told countless times to deliver provably broken, bug-ridden shit on the premise that "it's better to deliver quickly and iterate". Similarly, I've gotten the management stink-eye from discovering (and proving by fixing it) something that was running totally broken in production for years. When nothing matters, that is when companies can get away with producing garbage, the way they go about producing it also degrades. So I'd say the amount of attention and rigor applied to values and management principles is roughly commensurate with the amount of attention and rigor applied to product and engineering concerns. That is to say, just barely enough to get by. Yet somehow we print money...

throwanem 2y ago
Because that's what it's come to be about. We aren't here to serve our users, our bosses or each other. We are here to serve money and personal ambition, with "meritocracy" inhering solely in whether one serves one's own ambition or another's. Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.