7 ms·

The culture myth

86 points by bootload 14y ago

potatolicious 14y ago
"Corporate culture engineering" has always struck me as a cargo cult. Large, immobile, boring companies try to reinvent themselves as small, nimble, exciting... by copying the symptoms of a great corporate culture, not the causes. Free food is not corporate culture. Scooters is not corporate culture. Beanbags is not corporate culture. They are the natural expressions of an already-working culture, and will not lead themselves to one just because you've decided to build airplanes out of straw and bamboo. Shortly before I left Amazon I was given a plastic (code) ninja action figure, which was, supposedly, some kind of new corporate mascot. We were all encouraged to take pictures with this ninja in interesting places, as some kind of "fun" thing. But of course, you can't order fun into existence, and the whole thing smelled very obviously of stuffy suits failing to get it. A fun, exciting company invents traditions like this, not vice versa.
- RegEx 14y ago
  Reading this saddens me. Amazon is where I'm hoping to end up in about 5 years...
  - phene 14y ago
    Don't do it! Go find a small start-up doing something that interests you.
  - enjo 14y ago
    That's the thing about "culture". It's defined very much by the people involved most directly in it. Within a company like Amazon you will have teams that foster amazing environments. You'll also have teams that hand out toy ninjas. The trick is to figure out how to land yourself in the former.
    - jmduke 14y ago
      This is a great point. I think the big difference in 'culture' at BigCos is that when you're thinking about scales of thousands of employees, its impossible to try and really instill cultural values at a micro level, especially with things like bean bag chairs. It occurs at a much smaller level -- the team.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    As someone who's currently working at Amazon -- don't worry. I love it here.
  - TheCowboy 14y ago
    Corporations are temporal things, tools to achieve a purpose. Don't put your dreams in them or make it a goal to make one of them part of your identity in X timeyearthings. Identify what you think is attractive and a positive value and pursue that in 5 years time.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    Don't be too married to the idea. I know many, many, many Amazon alumnus, and not a single one wishes they were back there. There are a few beacons of light in the giant swamp that is Amazon, but IMO there are very few redeeming corners of the company. Overall, in general, the place is a dump (employer-quality speaking, the work they do is unquestionably amazing). Try asking your recruiter about the average tenure of an Amazon engineer and see them scramble madly to dodge the question (I know the number, but for the sake of politeness I won't put it out there). They are, culturally, very much a big-giant-corp pretending like they are a small nimble startup. Everything from the "two pizza team" concept down to "frugal like a startup" (read: this is code to mean that your dev machine won't have been built in the last 5 years) is meant to evoke it, but really just elicits frustration and anger instead. Even in the "good" teams it will constantly feel like your boss is waging an epic battle against Evil just so you can have the peace to get your work done. Fun note: circa 2011 my dev machine was a Celeron 1.5GHz. My codebase took a whopping 15 minutes to build even though a $1000 machine could have built it in a tenth the time. I knew incrediby talented, amazing engineers who were given 2 15" monitors dating circa 2002 and told to live with it. I'm not one for exorbitant gear, but this is entirely indicative of Amazon's internal culture. I'm glad I cut my teeth at Amazon out of college, but I am extremely glad to have graduated out of both Amazon and Seattle, and have found much happier employment and residence elsewhere.
    - justinmk 14y ago
      > circa 2011 my dev machine was a Celeron 1.5GHz. Of all the negative anecdotes I've read about Amazon, this is the most effective. > glad to have graduated out of both Amazon and Seattle, care to elaborate on Seattle?
      - WiseWeasel 14y ago
        Seattle has terrible weather. You can tell by the quality of the raincoats everyone is wearing.
        saraid216 14y ago
        Seriously. This fucking sunshine is like being in an oven.
  - jaimebuelta 14y ago
    Don't think of big companies as a one, gigantic and monolithic culture. The fact is that inside big companies there are lots of departments, and they can be quite different one for the other... I had this experience with different big corporations, where department A is a really nice place to work and department B is awful... There are some shared things, of course, but it could be different enough to make a huge difference...
- riffraff 14y ago
  I have a bit of confusion about your situation so pardon me asking: If you work in a team of four and your manager hands you a toy ninja and says "let's take pictures with it!", that is cool IFF there is no higher management? Or, is it cool only if a peer thinks of it? Or, the issue is that the idea came from more people at a distance more than X? Or the issue is that they told you that you must take pics with it, rather than saying "you know what would be cool" ? Or is it just a general "this doesn't feel right". Because it would seem to me that your company _invented_ a tradition like that, it's just that you didn't like that it wasn't invented from the guy sitting next to you. I understand and have experienced the feeling of looking at BigCo and thinking "boy, they are trying too hard to seem fun", but I am wondering how much of the judgement is the _existing_ notion that they are a boring corporate.
  - dionidium 14y ago
    Because it would seem to me that your company _invented_ a tradition like that, it's just that you didn't like that it wasn't invented from the guy sitting next to you. Yes, but even if the reason for bucking the new "tradition" is spite or envy (and I don't think it is in this case) that's reason enough. The whole point is that culture emerges; it is not prescribed. It doesn't matter why it didn't emerge. If it didn't, it can't be forced.
  - WalterSear 14y ago
    People do stupid stuff like taking pictures of plastic toys >because< they are having fun, which is a decent sign that the culture is good. Doing goofy shit isn't inherently fun just because its goofy. It certainly won't improve your corporate culture - it's the result not the cause.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    Meh, I think it's a function of company size. FROM: Corporate Fun Squad <dl-funsqad@exchange.bigcorp.com> TO: All US-WEST Employees <dl-us-west@exchange.bigcorp.com> SUBJECT: Put your picture on Sharepoint!
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    It is very much contextual. At my current job, if my manager hands me the toy ninja, I would happily try to take pictures with it. Because my manager is very much knee-deep in the trenches with the rest of the devs, designers, and QA folk day in day out. He has, without fail, and repeatedly, shown that he understands the situation "on the ground" and has always treated our concerns with the respect and gravity demanded. At Amazon there was not a chance - my manager was the guy barking orders from up high, funneling the whims of even higher management down with little to no filtering or defense for our ability to get it done. He was a straight pass-through, and it sucked. Him handing me the ninja would have been a damned insult (and it was). The question is not job titles, it's entirely about the working relationship, and this is also why "inventing culture" fails. When you have an incredibly segmented workforce, where management is entirely separated from the grunts, and neither side have any respect for the other, any such "culture" is naturally a decree enforced from the top, rather than a genuine expression of what employees already feel.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  I was recently playing around with modelling business growth using logistic equations, and I came upon a possible reason why large companies are unable to be nimble and dynamic in the way small companies are. Note: The basic logistic equation is 1/(1 + e^-t) which one can extend to be S = M / (1 + e ^ (-rt-y)) where M is the maximum growth capacity, r is growth rate, y is number of years to the 50% mark. Anyway, it produces nice S-shaped growth curves that generally approximate growth in a limited environment. Anyway working with these a few things occurred to me. Near the bottom of the growth curve, growth is very slow. It then picks up suddenly, grows to a certain point, then growth rate declines and the market size tapers off. Lack of immediate success along these curves may be due to a growth rate that is too low or a market size that is too small (duh) but when we vary both maximum size (M) and growth rate (r) something really interesting happens. If we have a curve that successfully predicts two or three years of growth but then overperforms what we observe, this has exactly two causes: Either M is much bigger than expected and r is much smaller (meaning smaller growth now but much more growth later), or M is much smaller and y is much bigger (meaning the market is already saturated). You can't differentiate these just looking at how a project is performing. A small business can bet against the short term and for the future. A larger, publicly held business is often less able to do so, so getting over the slow growth in the lead-in of the logistic sigmoid is really tough in a larger corporate environment. This is probably a good part of the reason why big companies have a much harder time innovating.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Sadly, there is a substantial market for helping companies pretend to acquire fashionable trait X without making any of the substantial changes that would require. I was involved in "Agile" before the term had been coined, and there was a ton of meat there. But year by year the substance was leached away, until most of the consulting money was in, as you say, adopting symptoms. In talking with manufacturing people, the same thing happened with Lean Manufacturing. And I see it starting to happen with the Lean Startup thing. It kills me. I originally thought this was driven by cynical assholes. Which I could have solved as soon as I figured out how to dispose of the bodies. But the problem is worse: it's all well-meaning people who just aren't paying enough attention to what's really going on.
- mh_ 14y ago
  Agree 100%. In fact in 2010 I wrote a post titled:Cargo Cult startups on exactly this: http://blog.thinkst.com/2010/04/cargo-cult-startups.html http://blog.thinkst.com/2010/04/cargo-cult-startups.html
nwienert 14y ago
While the article is a well written summary on what corporate culture can be based on, I fail to see where the "myth" is. Is it that just having culture is all thats needed? I don't think that was ever a misconception. In fact, Delivering Happiness covers most of his points already (re: hiring for culture, openness & feedback). I think a better and less link-baity title would have been "What culture should and shouldnt be". He didn't really disprove any specific "myth" and only really stated an opinion on how to implement culture. His two unsupported illustrations of bad culture ("Nerf guns and toy helicopters" leading to it being "hollow") were IMO not really myths at all just a setup for the rest of the article.
- tehviking 14y ago
  To my shame, sometimes I write the headline of a draft of a post weeks before actually finish it. I'd actually planned to change it, but basically spaced it during my furious 2AM writing session. Please note I didn't submit it to HN or anything, and I typically bristle at linkbait headlines. But if there's any meat to the "myth" moniker, it's in the growing notion that culture can be cargo-culted by bringing in no-track vacation policies or nerf guns.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  The myth is the idea that you can fake corporate culture. That allowing and encouraging nerf battles, casual attire, and whatnot represents "corporate culture". Corporate culture is how people are treated, how work gets done, how communication happens, etc. You can pretend to have an open and "fun" corporate culture by faking it with bouncy castle parties every month, but at the end of the day if you still have a culture of scapegoating, blame, and problem avoidance then that's your true culture, not the fun and open facade.
vosper 14y ago
'If an organization has a strong vision, high trust in its people, and tight feedback loops, it would be very difficult for it to have a “bad culture”.' Of these three, only "trust in its people" is relevant to the development of culture, in so far as culture means "a productive and fun environment that I/others would want to work at". Organisational vision is important as it pertains to preventing myopia; tight feedback loops keep people on track - but a great culture is best achieved by hiring highly skilled people with a good sense of humour, tolerance towards the views of others, strong interpersonal skills, and perhaps a little bit of wackiness - and letting them do their jobs, whilst trusting that when they're goofing around having a laugh it will be positive for the energy of the company and not come at too great a cost to their work. Edit: Removed emphasis on culture solely for attracting employees
- enjo 14y ago
  I think that's a shallow view of what makes a company enjoyable to work for in the first place, however. Tight feedback loops not only keep people on track, they provide amazing feedback about what you are doing. That security in knowing that what you are working on matters and that you are doing the job well creates security. Nothing is more important to the morale of employees, in my experience, than feeling appreciated and secure in their work. The same thing applies to vision. I've met very few people in my life who are ok with picking up a pay-check while working on projects that are failing for companies that are adrift. A company that lacks vision, no matter how amazing the team behind it, will inevitably be a terrible place to work. At least in my experience. After all, it's not enough for me to really like everyone I work with. I need the satisfaction of knowing that I'm doing a good job (feedback) contributing to something of real importance (vision).
ethank 14y ago
The division I co-run at my company was created partially to ship product to market, and partially to ship culture as its other primary product. We treat our culture as something akin to a shippable technology product, complete with user stories, implementation, measurement, learning, reiterating, etc. Anyhow: http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/02/16/culture-is-a-product/ http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/02/16/culture-is-a-produ...
stevvooe 14y ago
The manager I least appreciated had banners hung about with the slogan "Is it good for the company?", from office space. Working for him was depressing and, in my opinion, an incredible setback to my career. If anecodotal evidence is ever accepted as proof that shallow attempts at fostering corporate culture is detrimental, I shall more than ablige in providing my input.
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  Were the signs hung with any irony?
  - riffic 14y ago
    does it matter?
  - stevvooe 14y ago
    Too many levels of irony to sort out at this point.
einhverfr 14y ago
Interesting thoughts. However for my business plan I have been looking at a bunch of other things and come to some other conclusions. The first thing is, you can't build culture from the top-down and if you try hard enough you will look like Kim Jong Il. That there is a corporate culture is automatic though and it arises from the everyday way people interact in a business. In the first days of a business, the founders tend to be very flexible, willing to take on eachothers' roles as needed to some degree. There aren't turf wars. Just everyone working together to make the company great. Then you hire more people and a problem develops. People feel a need to quantify and control everything. And so management develops. What management really is there fore is to be a political filter which exists in between the employee and the executives and ensures that nobody takes proper risks. My approach is going to be somewhat different. First we are going with a relatively flat model inspired by WL Gore, Valve and Github, and where we have to add management and escalation, we make these as non-management-like as possible. Our key values are likely to be openness, collaboration, collegiality, and entrepreneurship. We will hire quality employees and get out of their way. Executives will work side-by-side with employees on projects deemed to be of critical importance. Leadership --- and followership --- will be distributed throughout the organization. This all sounds great until one comes back to the culture issue. Is it even possible to manage corporate culture as one climbs the logistic sigmoid? Or does maturity bring habits? In other words, is it true you can't teach an old dog new tricks?
- taligent 14y ago
  I can think of one problem with that. Not everyone likes to work on projects with their boss. It can lead to important team members becoming subservient and afraid of speaking up. It can make other members change what they say to try and win points. And it can engender a culture of distrust.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    I would assume that at first, when you have 5 employees, everyone is working, hands-on, together. When you have 50 employees, many may be doing things that are regulated by other dynamics in the company and where the executive mostly just makes sure he/she's available to advise, mentor, and more rarely take action. But you are likely to still have those new and exciting initiatives, where a small group of people needs to work together to make it happen. So you might have an executive and four employees working together, hands-on in this. But you are right to worry about employees being afraid to speak up. This is why it is important to have a culture of openness, collaboration, and collegiality, and where leadership and followership are distributed. One other caveat: because of the market we are in we are likely to be hiring older developers with at least some self-employment experience. At some point if we start hiring younger folks I would expect the transition will be a slower one with a lot more mentoring. I would worry a lot less about all this with older developers who have been their own bosses and are clearly told we want them to continue to be their own bosses to the extent possible than I would folks without that experience.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The problem with mobs is that within a mob a lot of subtlety is lost. So when weighing the relative advantages of one thing which has diffuse, gradual, hard-to-define benefits versus another thing which has concrete, blatant, and immediate benefits the mob will almost invariably pick the second one. And this is a big problem for companies because as a company gets larger and larger it stops being a single group of friends or acquaintances and becomes, essentially, a mob. Elements of healthy corporate culture such as trust are easily traded off by the mob for the seemingly superior "accountability" of micro-management, for example. And you see the same patterns in everything at a big company. Ever notice how internal tools in a big company are typically of very shoddy quality? That's because the pain of poor tooling is diffuse and spread out over time while the effort required to create better tools would be immediate and concrete (representing some opportunity cost to develop some shipped feature or such-like). And the same calculus applies to refactoring and re-engineering efforts. The same dynamics play out in society as large as well. It can be difficult to stand up and fight for individual rights such as freedom of speech or the right to own firearms in the face of strong, highly focused criticism. And if such rights hadn't been enshrined in the US constitution they would be that much harder to retain. Drug use being a perfect example. It can be a serious uphill battle to argue for the right to, say, use heroin and that such a right will lead to a better society. The same thing applies to, say, "letting" employees come into work at noon and work a 4 hour day sometimes.
- Evbn 14y ago
  I have never worked at a small company with better tools than a big company. The big companies have Developer Tools teams.
dreamdu5t 14y ago
I would leave immediately if my boss handed me a plastic toy and told me to take pictures with it to prove I'm having "fun." That is controlling, manipulative, and degrading.

86 points by bootload 14y ago

"Corporate culture engineering" has always struck me as a cargo cult. Large, immobile, boring companies try to reinvent themselves as small, nimble, exciting... by copying the symptoms of a great corporate culture, not the causes. Free food is not corporate culture. Scooters is not corporate culture. Beanbags is not corporate culture. They are the natural expressions of an already-working culture, and will not lead themselves to one just because you've decided to build airplanes out of straw and bamboo. Shortly before I left Amazon I was given a plastic (code) ninja action figure, which was, supposedly, some kind of new corporate mascot. We were all encouraged to take pictures with this ninja in interesting places, as some kind of "fun" thing. But of course, you can't order fun into existence, and the whole thing smelled very obviously of stuffy suits failing to get it. A fun, exciting company invents traditions like this, not vice versa.

RegEx 14y ago
Reading this saddens me. Amazon is where I'm hoping to end up in about 5 years...
- phene 14y ago
  Don't do it! Go find a small start-up doing something that interests you.
- enjo 14y ago
  That's the thing about "culture". It's defined very much by the people involved most directly in it. Within a company like Amazon you will have teams that foster amazing environments. You'll also have teams that hand out toy ninjas. The trick is to figure out how to land yourself in the former.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    This is a great point. I think the big difference in 'culture' at BigCos is that when you're thinking about scales of thousands of employees, its impossible to try and really instill cultural values at a micro level, especially with things like bean bag chairs. It occurs at a much smaller level -- the team.
- jmduke 14y ago
  As someone who's currently working at Amazon -- don't worry. I love it here.
- TheCowboy 14y ago
  Corporations are temporal things, tools to achieve a purpose. Don't put your dreams in them or make it a goal to make one of them part of your identity in X timeyearthings. Identify what you think is attractive and a positive value and pursue that in 5 years time.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Don't be too married to the idea. I know many, many, many Amazon alumnus, and not a single one wishes they were back there. There are a few beacons of light in the giant swamp that is Amazon, but IMO there are very few redeeming corners of the company. Overall, in general, the place is a dump (employer-quality speaking, the work they do is unquestionably amazing). Try asking your recruiter about the average tenure of an Amazon engineer and see them scramble madly to dodge the question (I know the number, but for the sake of politeness I won't put it out there). They are, culturally, very much a big-giant-corp pretending like they are a small nimble startup. Everything from the "two pizza team" concept down to "frugal like a startup" (read: this is code to mean that your dev machine won't have been built in the last 5 years) is meant to evoke it, but really just elicits frustration and anger instead. Even in the "good" teams it will constantly feel like your boss is waging an epic battle against Evil just so you can have the peace to get your work done. Fun note: circa 2011 my dev machine was a Celeron 1.5GHz. My codebase took a whopping 15 minutes to build even though a $1000 machine could have built it in a tenth the time. I knew incrediby talented, amazing engineers who were given 2 15" monitors dating circa 2002 and told to live with it. I'm not one for exorbitant gear, but this is entirely indicative of Amazon's internal culture. I'm glad I cut my teeth at Amazon out of college, but I am extremely glad to have graduated out of both Amazon and Seattle, and have found much happier employment and residence elsewhere.
  - justinmk 14y ago
    > circa 2011 my dev machine was a Celeron 1.5GHz. Of all the negative anecdotes I've read about Amazon, this is the most effective. > glad to have graduated out of both Amazon and Seattle, care to elaborate on Seattle?
    - WiseWeasel 14y ago
      Seattle has terrible weather. You can tell by the quality of the raincoats everyone is wearing.
      - saraid216 14y ago
        Seriously. This fucking sunshine is like being in an oven.
- jaimebuelta 14y ago
  Don't think of big companies as a one, gigantic and monolithic culture. The fact is that inside big companies there are lots of departments, and they can be quite different one for the other... I had this experience with different big corporations, where department A is a really nice place to work and department B is awful... There are some shared things, of course, but it could be different enough to make a huge difference...
riffraff 14y ago
I have a bit of confusion about your situation so pardon me asking: If you work in a team of four and your manager hands you a toy ninja and says "let's take pictures with it!", that is cool IFF there is no higher management? Or, is it cool only if a peer thinks of it? Or, the issue is that the idea came from more people at a distance more than X? Or the issue is that they told you that you must take pics with it, rather than saying "you know what would be cool" ? Or is it just a general "this doesn't feel right". Because it would seem to me that your company _invented_ a tradition like that, it's just that you didn't like that it wasn't invented from the guy sitting next to you. I understand and have experienced the feeling of looking at BigCo and thinking "boy, they are trying too hard to seem fun", but I am wondering how much of the judgement is the _existing_ notion that they are a boring corporate.
- dionidium 14y ago
  Because it would seem to me that your company _invented_ a tradition like that, it's just that you didn't like that it wasn't invented from the guy sitting next to you. Yes, but even if the reason for bucking the new "tradition" is spite or envy (and I don't think it is in this case) that's reason enough. The whole point is that culture emerges; it is not prescribed. It doesn't matter why it didn't emerge. If it didn't, it can't be forced.
- WalterSear 14y ago
  People do stupid stuff like taking pictures of plastic toys >because< they are having fun, which is a decent sign that the culture is good. Doing goofy shit isn't inherently fun just because its goofy. It certainly won't improve your corporate culture - it's the result not the cause.
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  Meh, I think it's a function of company size. FROM: Corporate Fun Squad <dl-funsqad@exchange.bigcorp.com> TO: All US-WEST Employees <dl-us-west@exchange.bigcorp.com> SUBJECT: Put your picture on Sharepoint!
- potatolicious 14y ago
  It is very much contextual. At my current job, if my manager hands me the toy ninja, I would happily try to take pictures with it. Because my manager is very much knee-deep in the trenches with the rest of the devs, designers, and QA folk day in day out. He has, without fail, and repeatedly, shown that he understands the situation "on the ground" and has always treated our concerns with the respect and gravity demanded. At Amazon there was not a chance - my manager was the guy barking orders from up high, funneling the whims of even higher management down with little to no filtering or defense for our ability to get it done. He was a straight pass-through, and it sucked. Him handing me the ninja would have been a damned insult (and it was). The question is not job titles, it's entirely about the working relationship, and this is also why "inventing culture" fails. When you have an incredibly segmented workforce, where management is entirely separated from the grunts, and neither side have any respect for the other, any such "culture" is naturally a decree enforced from the top, rather than a genuine expression of what employees already feel.
einhverfr 14y ago
I was recently playing around with modelling business growth using logistic equations, and I came upon a possible reason why large companies are unable to be nimble and dynamic in the way small companies are. Note: The basic logistic equation is 1/(1 + e^-t) which one can extend to be S = M / (1 + e ^ (-rt-y)) where M is the maximum growth capacity, r is growth rate, y is number of years to the 50% mark. Anyway, it produces nice S-shaped growth curves that generally approximate growth in a limited environment. Anyway working with these a few things occurred to me. Near the bottom of the growth curve, growth is very slow. It then picks up suddenly, grows to a certain point, then growth rate declines and the market size tapers off. Lack of immediate success along these curves may be due to a growth rate that is too low or a market size that is too small (duh) but when we vary both maximum size (M) and growth rate (r) something really interesting happens. If we have a curve that successfully predicts two or three years of growth but then overperforms what we observe, this has exactly two causes: Either M is much bigger than expected and r is much smaller (meaning smaller growth now but much more growth later), or M is much smaller and y is much bigger (meaning the market is already saturated). You can't differentiate these just looking at how a project is performing. A small business can bet against the short term and for the future. A larger, publicly held business is often less able to do so, so getting over the slow growth in the lead-in of the logistic sigmoid is really tough in a larger corporate environment. This is probably a good part of the reason why big companies have a much harder time innovating.
wpietri 14y ago
Sadly, there is a substantial market for helping companies pretend to acquire fashionable trait X without making any of the substantial changes that would require. I was involved in "Agile" before the term had been coined, and there was a ton of meat there. But year by year the substance was leached away, until most of the consulting money was in, as you say, adopting symptoms. In talking with manufacturing people, the same thing happened with Lean Manufacturing. And I see it starting to happen with the Lean Startup thing. It kills me. I originally thought this was driven by cynical assholes. Which I could have solved as soon as I figured out how to dispose of the bodies. But the problem is worse: it's all well-meaning people who just aren't paying enough attention to what's really going on.
mh_ 14y ago
Agree 100%. In fact in 2010 I wrote a post titled:Cargo Cult startups on exactly this: http://blog.thinkst.com/2010/04/cargo-cult-startups.html http://blog.thinkst.com/2010/04/cargo-cult-startups.html

nwienert 14y ago

While the article is a well written summary on what corporate culture can be based on, I fail to see where the "myth" is. Is it that just having culture is all thats needed? I don't think that was ever a misconception. In fact, Delivering Happiness covers most of his points already (re: hiring for culture, openness & feedback). I think a better and less link-baity title would have been "What culture should and shouldnt be". He didn't really disprove any specific "myth" and only really stated an opinion on how to implement culture. His two unsupported illustrations of bad culture ("Nerf guns and toy helicopters" leading to it being "hollow") were IMO not really myths at all just a setup for the rest of the article.

tehviking 14y ago
To my shame, sometimes I write the headline of a draft of a post weeks before actually finish it. I'd actually planned to change it, but basically spaced it during my furious 2AM writing session. Please note I didn't submit it to HN or anything, and I typically bristle at linkbait headlines. But if there's any meat to the "myth" moniker, it's in the growing notion that culture can be cargo-culted by bringing in no-track vacation policies or nerf guns.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The myth is the idea that you can fake corporate culture. That allowing and encouraging nerf battles, casual attire, and whatnot represents "corporate culture". Corporate culture is how people are treated, how work gets done, how communication happens, etc. You can pretend to have an open and "fun" corporate culture by faking it with bouncy castle parties every month, but at the end of the day if you still have a culture of scapegoating, blame, and problem avoidance then that's your true culture, not the fun and open facade.

vosper 14y ago

'If an organization has a strong vision, high trust in its people, and tight feedback loops, it would be very difficult for it to have a “bad culture”.' Of these three, only "trust in its people" is relevant to the development of culture, in so far as culture means "a productive and fun environment that I/others would want to work at". Organisational vision is important as it pertains to preventing myopia; tight feedback loops keep people on track - but a great culture is best achieved by hiring highly skilled people with a good sense of humour, tolerance towards the views of others, strong interpersonal skills, and perhaps a little bit of wackiness - and letting them do their jobs, whilst trusting that when they're goofing around having a laugh it will be positive for the energy of the company and not come at too great a cost to their work. Edit: Removed emphasis on culture solely for attracting employees

enjo 14y ago
I think that's a shallow view of what makes a company enjoyable to work for in the first place, however. Tight feedback loops not only keep people on track, they provide amazing feedback about what you are doing. That security in knowing that what you are working on matters and that you are doing the job well creates security. Nothing is more important to the morale of employees, in my experience, than feeling appreciated and secure in their work. The same thing applies to vision. I've met very few people in my life who are ok with picking up a pay-check while working on projects that are failing for companies that are adrift. A company that lacks vision, no matter how amazing the team behind it, will inevitably be a terrible place to work. At least in my experience. After all, it's not enough for me to really like everyone I work with. I need the satisfaction of knowing that I'm doing a good job (feedback) contributing to something of real importance (vision).

ethank 14y ago

The division I co-run at my company was created partially to ship product to market, and partially to ship culture as its other primary product. We treat our culture as something akin to a shippable technology product, complete with user stories, implementation, measurement, learning, reiterating, etc. Anyhow: http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/02/16/culture-is-a-product/ http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/02/16/culture-is-a-produ...

stevvooe 14y ago

The manager I least appreciated had banners hung about with the slogan "Is it good for the company?", from office space. Working for him was depressing and, in my opinion, an incredible setback to my career. If anecodotal evidence is ever accepted as proof that shallow attempts at fostering corporate culture is detrimental, I shall more than ablige in providing my input.

Domenic_S 14y ago
Were the signs hung with any irony?
- riffic 14y ago
  does it matter?
- stevvooe 14y ago
  Too many levels of irony to sort out at this point.

einhverfr 14y ago

Interesting thoughts. However for my business plan I have been looking at a bunch of other things and come to some other conclusions. The first thing is, you can't build culture from the top-down and if you try hard enough you will look like Kim Jong Il. That there is a corporate culture is automatic though and it arises from the everyday way people interact in a business. In the first days of a business, the founders tend to be very flexible, willing to take on eachothers' roles as needed to some degree. There aren't turf wars. Just everyone working together to make the company great. Then you hire more people and a problem develops. People feel a need to quantify and control everything. And so management develops. What management really is there fore is to be a political filter which exists in between the employee and the executives and ensures that nobody takes proper risks. My approach is going to be somewhat different. First we are going with a relatively flat model inspired by WL Gore, Valve and Github, and where we have to add management and escalation, we make these as non-management-like as possible. Our key values are likely to be openness, collaboration, collegiality, and entrepreneurship. We will hire quality employees and get out of their way. Executives will work side-by-side with employees on projects deemed to be of critical importance. Leadership --- and followership --- will be distributed throughout the organization. This all sounds great until one comes back to the culture issue. Is it even possible to manage corporate culture as one climbs the logistic sigmoid? Or does maturity bring habits? In other words, is it true you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

taligent 14y ago
I can think of one problem with that. Not everyone likes to work on projects with their boss. It can lead to important team members becoming subservient and afraid of speaking up. It can make other members change what they say to try and win points. And it can engender a culture of distrust.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  I would assume that at first, when you have 5 employees, everyone is working, hands-on, together. When you have 50 employees, many may be doing things that are regulated by other dynamics in the company and where the executive mostly just makes sure he/she's available to advise, mentor, and more rarely take action. But you are likely to still have those new and exciting initiatives, where a small group of people needs to work together to make it happen. So you might have an executive and four employees working together, hands-on in this. But you are right to worry about employees being afraid to speak up. This is why it is important to have a culture of openness, collaboration, and collegiality, and where leadership and followership are distributed. One other caveat: because of the market we are in we are likely to be hiring older developers with at least some self-employment experience. At some point if we start hiring younger folks I would expect the transition will be a slower one with a lot more mentoring. I would worry a lot less about all this with older developers who have been their own bosses and are clearly told we want them to continue to be their own bosses to the extent possible than I would folks without that experience.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

The problem with mobs is that within a mob a lot of subtlety is lost. So when weighing the relative advantages of one thing which has diffuse, gradual, hard-to-define benefits versus another thing which has concrete, blatant, and immediate benefits the mob will almost invariably pick the second one. And this is a big problem for companies because as a company gets larger and larger it stops being a single group of friends or acquaintances and becomes, essentially, a mob. Elements of healthy corporate culture such as trust are easily traded off by the mob for the seemingly superior "accountability" of micro-management, for example. And you see the same patterns in everything at a big company. Ever notice how internal tools in a big company are typically of very shoddy quality? That's because the pain of poor tooling is diffuse and spread out over time while the effort required to create better tools would be immediate and concrete (representing some opportunity cost to develop some shipped feature or such-like). And the same calculus applies to refactoring and re-engineering efforts. The same dynamics play out in society as large as well. It can be difficult to stand up and fight for individual rights such as freedom of speech or the right to own firearms in the face of strong, highly focused criticism. And if such rights hadn't been enshrined in the US constitution they would be that much harder to retain. Drug use being a perfect example. It can be a serious uphill battle to argue for the right to, say, use heroin and that such a right will lead to a better society. The same thing applies to, say, "letting" employees come into work at noon and work a 4 hour day sometimes.

Evbn 14y ago
I have never worked at a small company with better tools than a big company. The big companies have Developer Tools teams.

dreamdu5t 14y ago

I would leave immediately if my boss handed me a plastic toy and told me to take pictures with it to prove I'm having "fun." That is controlling, manipulative, and degrading.