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Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

483 points by gpi 1mo ago

newsomix9xl 1mo ago
The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful. Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture. Now what?
- AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
  Reading your post, I just realized that "bad culture" perfectly explains what bothered me about my last workplace. So thank you for that concise tag to put on what I was seeing. As for your "now what", companies with a bad culture will be at a competitive disadvantage. Their efforts to wring more productivity out of their broken culture usually make the culture worse. My advice would be to leave ships once you realize that they're sinking. (That doesn't make you a rat!)
  - newsomix9xl 1mo ago
    Glad I could help, but if the solution is "good culture" and culture is made by managers and C-levels, and they're not doing it, writing blogs that are, effectively, saying "good management makes people productive" is so obvious that it hardly seems worth saying. What might be more pointed, instead of pointing to the "useful effects of good culture" why not have actual tactics on how to reform or remove bad management and preserve and expand good management?
    - AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
      I'm sure there are such things - if you're the CEO. If you're a minion, though, then all that's available is praying, enduring, or leaving, because a minion's ability to change a toxic C-level culture is zero. But I don't think my comment is as hopeless as all that. There are places with better culture; all other things being equal, they should be out-performing places with bad culture. That means that they should be more likely to hire, and more likely to pay better. So, if you're in a place with bad culture, don't just sit there. Go looking.
- bloodyplonker22 1mo ago
  I remember the devops guys preaching about this "better culture". They talked about a no-blame culture for one. It resulted in a bunch of virtue signaling where I worked. At the end of the day, the people repeatedly causing ops related problems were canned anyway. They were still blamed of course, just behind closed doors. This "culture" went so far that there was even a company named after it called "Blameless", which fell into the depths of oblivion.
  - esseph 1mo ago
    It's still around and in use a lot of places, but that means you actually have to have an engineering culture at the company and less of an entrenched MBA type. https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/ https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/
- shimman 1mo ago
  Argue the need to implement workplace democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy The idea that we shouldn't be able to vote for our bosses is completely ridiculous. If we had truly collaborative workplaces it would probably unlikely another $50 trillion worth of value once you give workers the ability to exercise their voice (passionate workers want stable working environments, if executives are never held accountable by their subordinates how can we argue such an unfree system is worth preserving?).
  - dolni 1mo ago
    As a worker, you can exercise your voice... by getting another job. That is your vote. The power of your vote is proportional to the value you bring. A while back I threatened to quit because I had a team dynamic that was untenable. I made a management change mandatory. I got a new boss. The old boss was later terminated.
    - tikhonj 1mo ago
      You can also exercise your voice by... talking. That might mean trying to convince leadership, it might mean trying to coordinate a bunch of people who agree with you but don't want to act on their own, or, who knows, it might mean something else. But there are quite a lot of things you can do that are short of threatening to quit or simply leaving. (And sometimes just leaving really is the best step!)
      - sph87 1mo ago
        I would argue that’s an asymmetric game. If your boss’s boss or higher already dislikes your boss, then convincing leadership would be easy. But bad bosses don’t become the big bad boss by winning over their subordinates. They spend more time with their own boss than you do, your boss is likely going to have a better relationship with their own boss than you do, simply by proximity. Assuming they aren’t just a flat asshole of course. A vote would in turn provide a mechanism to prevent such abuse. The boss works for the people not for their boss. Likewise the boss is no longer bound to the whims of their own boss. Their boss is the people below them. A group they will inevitably rejoin with new found appreciation for the troubles of management.
sublinear 1mo ago
Can we finally just admit that using AI for coding is equivalent (or maybe even slightly inferior) to web search? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Giving junior devs or non-devs what is essentially automated stackoverflow copypasta on steroids only amplified all the downsides of inexperience that we already learned well over a decade ago.
- justincormack 1mo ago
  No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.
  - sublinear 1mo ago
    What does that have to do with productivity? Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. An inexperienced person delegating what they don't understand to AI produces more bugs, not less. Those mindlessly copying from stackoverflow were in a similar situation, but only because they ignored or didn't understand the warnings from the discussion. You're rolling the dice if you expect AI to explain itself, as it can only ever know at most what it scraped from (stackoverflow and poorly documented github repos). As it was not too long ago, searching on stackoverflow was already a hail mary play. AI just makes the problem worse. At best, with AI there's a lot of reinventing the wheel with no hope of ever doing better than merely approximating the wheel.
    - derektank 1mo ago
      > Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.
      - esseph 1mo ago
        > Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity. Wrong. You can dig a tunnel that fills in and kills you. You can drive in a huge circle to get not the house next door. You can kick out 1M lines of code a day that you don't understand and can't read. It's only productive if the work produces value.
cyanydeez 1mo ago
If this is true, almost all of big tech is becoming unproductive; so that follows.
zug_zug 1mo ago
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 blog posts for constructive criticism? Or even managers? I look at the market forces at play, and I just don't think many (any?) organization successfully create an incentive structure where performance on intangibles (specifically management) can be assessed well enough to make a bad culture into a better culture. I've worked at zero places where managers where seriously held to account for how "motivated" their employees were; when there were surveys of engagement engineers almost never truly believed they were anonymous (and why would they?) and were hesitant to give honest feedback. In short, being a CEO is a skill of crafting and debugging a machine of people, a skill that I think life gives almost no training for, and a skill that most people with that title have no awareness or aptitude for. </rant>
- cryzinger 1mo ago
  > 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 blog posts for constructive criticism? I think the odds of any particular article making it onto a CEO's radar are low, and the odds of them actually taking good advice to heart (let alone implementing it) are even lower. That said... I also get the impression that the shittest kinds of C-levels and VPs are disproportionately swayed by whatever opinion they last read in their daily email newsletter or heard on a five-minute podcast snippet. So at least in theory, if you were able to inject a seed of a good idea into the zeitgeist, that idea might reach the level of saturation where it turns into a form of white-collar peer pressure. Unfortunately I also think the ideas that reach the peer pressure saturation point tend to be less "be nice to your employees" and more "put shock collars on them and make them beg for their jobs," but I guess it can't hurt to try?
  - sandeepkd 1mo ago
    I think sharing such ideas openly allows people to converge on similar feelings and experience which eventually leads to people experimenting these for real. We need to take into account that a lot of people reading and writing these kind of thoughts seriously may not be CEO at present but that does not prevents the possibility of them becoming the CEO's in future
joshheitzman 1mo ago
It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture.
- cindyllm 1mo ago
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- kevinprk 1mo ago
  > It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture. Very agreed.
aesthetics1 1mo ago
AI accelerates dysfunction. It will help you get to the wrong place faster if you're already heading there. I do believe the opposite is true too. If you have a strong culture, a product or idea with promise, and a team of smart and capable people, it can move you faster in the right direction too. The problem is that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2.
- claw-el 1mo ago
  I think that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2 because they see ‘speed’ in ‘completing work’ as a signal in better performance. Especially since VCs are pushing for speed (https://x.com/Alfred_Lin/article/2084636778791858256 https://x.com/Alfred_Lin/article/2084636778791858256), a lot of misguided person and company who is moving fast thinks they are in group 2, when the speed they have only doubles them down group 1
lilerjee 1mo ago
How to develop good culture? Firstly remove AI.
rawgabbit 1mo ago
AI style writing; didn’t bother.
bitwize 1mo ago
The biggest stock-price hack for a CEO is: * announce that effective immediately, the company will begin its transformation to an "AI-first" organization, with AI driving most development workflows by end of year * percolate the message through upper management down to line managers that they are to assure their reports that the aim of the transformation is to augment current employees, not reduce headcount * stealthily start lopping off heads anyway
sghiassy 1mo ago
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
- CSMastermind 1mo ago
  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.
  - mohamedkoubaa 1mo ago
    Sometimes they get it but don't know the recipe to cook it themselves so they get takeout (talent acquisition)
  - danpalmer 1mo ago
    It's hard because you have to constantly make "sub-optimal" decisions. If you optimise for things you can measure, or at least see right now, you get a low performing team of high performers, or you get a collection of local maxima. Optimising for a global maximum requires making decisions that have unclear pay-off, that are harder to justify. Another problem is that one of these decisions that was actually wrong, vs one that hasn't paid off yet, look the same. I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.
    - jmalicki 1mo ago
      There's also the executive's incentives, and "I'll be gone, you'll be gone": the payoff for that is very long, and it will be hard for them to take credit, and their own tenure might not be as long as that team's.
    - antod 1mo ago
      Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem. The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers. The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team
andrii 1mo ago
It always felt like AI adoption should come from the bottom up, driven by people who are actually in a position to assess whether it makes any positive impact. Granted, that only works if your culture encourages agency in the first place.
- sph87 1mo ago
  Welcome to a day in the life. The company I work for prides themselves on a culture of agency and letting developers be developers. I am pushing the AI revolution but the compliance requirements and modern Luddite zeitgeist are a daily source of frustration. If the AI isn’t perfect then it’s slop. But we’ll gladly excuse the existing 2 million lines of spaghetti code because of past deadlines and lack of resources to pay down the tech debt today. Fingers crossed though. Every failure brings you one step closer to an inevitable success.
  - dinkumthinkum 1mo ago
    The "Luddite zeitgeist"? :) Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it.
  - johnnyanmac 1mo ago
    >But we’ll gladly excuse the existing 2 million lines of spaghetti code because of past deadlines and lack of resources to pay down the tech debt today. Well, if the AI is so efficient, it should be able to cut down on tech debt, no? Be a great way to kill two birds with one stone. The issue is that the tech debt was there for years, likely before most people started there. The AI is in their control to utilize or refuse.
jesse_dot_id 1mo ago
My company has a great culture and also AI.
ElProlactin 1mo ago
> 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 jobs, it's an employer's market.
- Kinrany 1mo ago
  You're listing examples where there is no market
  - ElProlactin 1mo ago
    Correction: I'm listing examples where "the market" doesn't function like an ideal, healthy market. Search, social media, key SaaS markets, healthcare, insurance, etc.
    - Kinrany 1mo ago
      Right. So these are all examples of market forces being irrelevant. This isn't the market showing that culture doesn't matter: when the winner is predetermined, culture or anything else couldn't _possibly_ matter, as long as it is not so critical that getting it wrong kills the company in the most literal sense.
      - ElProlactin 1mo ago
        I understand your angle, but I'm coming from a different one: these are the "market forces" that matter today across a wide swath of industry, and, most importantly, the most lucrative industry. Capital beats culture most of the time today, so companies optimize how they use capital.
        Kinrany 1mo ago
        Yes, my objection is to the use of "market forces", which are widely assumed to favor efficiency. What we're talking about is, pedantically, something else, something like "capital allocation game theory". A different game that is not known to favor anything in particular, as far as I know. TFA argues that good culture is important for productivity/efficiency, so any counterpoint would need to come from a game that does say something about efficiency.
dirtbag__dad 1mo ago
[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. Employment is an exchange and esp for those who work hard, they deserve the recognition. 3. “People” (aka HR) is taken seriously. The team is expected to be checked in. Those who aren’t get fired. Ideally, there’s enough in place for individuals to come to their own conclusion that they should be fired. See #1. When a req is open it’s a top priority of whoever is in charge. You can be PM-nonexistent or PM-heavy with lots of meetings and JIRA. Maybe you can accomplish all 3 above in both worlds. My experience is that process when done right moves the needle. No process leads to nonsense and process for the sake of process grinds it to a halt. It all gets better when the leaders are bought in or self aware enough to get out of the way. If you push for change long enough, and aren’t an asshole about it, just genuinely interested and motivated, there’s a chance you’ll see your vision for better culture materialize.
- ls-a 1mo ago
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- ahsteele 1mo ago
  > If you push for change long enough, and aren’t an asshole about it, just genuinely interested and motivated, there’s a chance you’ll see your vision for better culture materialize. Throughout my career, I’ve described this as “polite persistence is how you effect change.”
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lukan 1mo ago
    Unpolitely breaching walls and doors is also how you effect change, but I prefer the polite persistence for a better long term effect as well.
linuxhansl 1mo ago
After 35 years in the industry in various capacities (from architect, engineer, VP, and different products, small and large companies, ...) I can heartily confirm this. A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least). I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software. If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.
- MyHonestOpinon 1mo ago
  > I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software. This is so true. We have figured out how to use an endless list of software tools. Hardly anyone is as prepared to use the new tools as software engineers.
- yttt 1mo ago
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chanux 1mo ago
Does culture eat strategy for breakfast?
steinbeck 1mo ago
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syngrog66 1mo ago
smart experienced people, unencumbered
yangcheng 1mo ago
Good culture is hard to define. it's almost like you can see it and you can feel it, but can't replicate it
conartist6 1mo ago
Wow it's like: it was before, and it still is. Truly incredible!
AnonHP 1mo ago
A bit weird writing style, and I don’t know if this is Substack or the lack of proofreading. 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.
opem 1mo ago
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.
- TonyAlicea10 1mo ago
  I like to say AI is like the super soldier serum from the MCU. Teams take it and either become Captain America or Red Skull, it depends on what you were to begin with.
  - johnnyanmac 1mo ago
    I wish. The "captain Americas" are more like Tony Stark's jury rigged suit used in the desert (for now). It's not the suit truly doing innovation, it's the man inside who knows the suit (and its many limitations/flaws) inside out. Using the strengths long enough to escape before the hunk of metal inevitably fell apart.
- yttt 1mo ago
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Devyansh_raj 1mo ago
So True!
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
wartywhoa23 1mo ago
The elephant in the room nobody's willing to notice is the asinine idea of infinite growth, which absolutely throws all opposition to using any New Shiny Tech X That Multiplies Productivity X² Times out of the window. The adherents of this infinite growth seem to be bound by some kind of blood-signed obligation to use everything and anything out there that could sustain their doomed run. Fucking know your limits. Because if scientists prove that ancient (and not so ancient) human sacrifices were in fact business boosters on some arcane quantum level of reality, you know what's coming next after the AI hype.
- Kinrany 1mo ago
  Infinite growth isn't a myth in general, the world economy does grow over time and for obvious reasons. But of course this doesn't necessarily translate to individual companies growing at the same rate all the time.
noisy_boy 1mo ago
Good culture is basically dont-be-an-asshole culture. Which is very hard to do. In a distant past, my team was one of the teams under a senior manager. This guy never threw his weight around, asked questions, listened to us, trusted us and instead of pretending everything was an emergency, actually cut some slack but told us in no uncertain terms when we were supposed to be full steam ahead. Below him, my manager and me and other folks were technical people who just wanted to get stuff done. It was amazing how excited we were to, not only do new stuff but improve existing stuff (sometimes by trying new things). The senior manager shielded us from the political games, his vertical got the credit for good stuff we did and we actually looked forward to coming to office. The pay sucked so I had to move on but I didn't see that experience replicated anywhere else - either the managers will just trying to slave-drive and/or there were always people trying to fuck things up for their own gain. Basically, asshole behavior.
iamflimflam1 1mo ago
In my experience, every company is great until things start going wrong. And when things start going wrong, no amount of culture is going to save you.
cindyllm 1mo ago
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syndacks 1mo ago
This is an AI written advertisement with a bunch of platitudes.
polishdude20 1mo ago
How good the culture is at a company is inversely proportional to how often the company talks about it.

483 points by gpi 1mo ago

The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful. Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture. Now what?

AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
Reading your post, I just realized that "bad culture" perfectly explains what bothered me about my last workplace. So thank you for that concise tag to put on what I was seeing. As for your "now what", companies with a bad culture will be at a competitive disadvantage. Their efforts to wring more productivity out of their broken culture usually make the culture worse. My advice would be to leave ships once you realize that they're sinking. (That doesn't make you a rat!)
- newsomix9xl 1mo ago
  Glad I could help, but if the solution is "good culture" and culture is made by managers and C-levels, and they're not doing it, writing blogs that are, effectively, saying "good management makes people productive" is so obvious that it hardly seems worth saying. What might be more pointed, instead of pointing to the "useful effects of good culture" why not have actual tactics on how to reform or remove bad management and preserve and expand good management?
  - AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
    I'm sure there are such things - if you're the CEO. If you're a minion, though, then all that's available is praying, enduring, or leaving, because a minion's ability to change a toxic C-level culture is zero. But I don't think my comment is as hopeless as all that. There are places with better culture; all other things being equal, they should be out-performing places with bad culture. That means that they should be more likely to hire, and more likely to pay better. So, if you're in a place with bad culture, don't just sit there. Go looking.
bloodyplonker22 1mo ago
I remember the devops guys preaching about this "better culture". They talked about a no-blame culture for one. It resulted in a bunch of virtue signaling where I worked. At the end of the day, the people repeatedly causing ops related problems were canned anyway. They were still blamed of course, just behind closed doors. This "culture" went so far that there was even a company named after it called "Blameless", which fell into the depths of oblivion.
- esseph 1mo ago
  It's still around and in use a lot of places, but that means you actually have to have an engineering culture at the company and less of an entrenched MBA type. https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/ https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/
shimman 1mo ago
Argue the need to implement workplace democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy The idea that we shouldn't be able to vote for our bosses is completely ridiculous. If we had truly collaborative workplaces it would probably unlikely another $50 trillion worth of value once you give workers the ability to exercise their voice (passionate workers want stable working environments, if executives are never held accountable by their subordinates how can we argue such an unfree system is worth preserving?).
- dolni 1mo ago
  As a worker, you can exercise your voice... by getting another job. That is your vote. The power of your vote is proportional to the value you bring. A while back I threatened to quit because I had a team dynamic that was untenable. I made a management change mandatory. I got a new boss. The old boss was later terminated.
  - tikhonj 1mo ago
    You can also exercise your voice by... talking. That might mean trying to convince leadership, it might mean trying to coordinate a bunch of people who agree with you but don't want to act on their own, or, who knows, it might mean something else. But there are quite a lot of things you can do that are short of threatening to quit or simply leaving. (And sometimes just leaving really is the best step!)
    - sph87 1mo ago
      I would argue that’s an asymmetric game. If your boss’s boss or higher already dislikes your boss, then convincing leadership would be easy. But bad bosses don’t become the big bad boss by winning over their subordinates. They spend more time with their own boss than you do, your boss is likely going to have a better relationship with their own boss than you do, simply by proximity. Assuming they aren’t just a flat asshole of course. A vote would in turn provide a mechanism to prevent such abuse. The boss works for the people not for their boss. Likewise the boss is no longer bound to the whims of their own boss. Their boss is the people below them. A group they will inevitably rejoin with new found appreciation for the troubles of management.

sublinear 1mo ago

Can we finally just admit that using AI for coding is equivalent (or maybe even slightly inferior) to web search? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Giving junior devs or non-devs what is essentially automated stackoverflow copypasta on steroids only amplified all the downsides of inexperience that we already learned well over a decade ago.

justincormack 1mo ago
No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.
- sublinear 1mo ago
  What does that have to do with productivity? Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. An inexperienced person delegating what they don't understand to AI produces more bugs, not less. Those mindlessly copying from stackoverflow were in a similar situation, but only because they ignored or didn't understand the warnings from the discussion. You're rolling the dice if you expect AI to explain itself, as it can only ever know at most what it scraped from (stackoverflow and poorly documented github repos). As it was not too long ago, searching on stackoverflow was already a hail mary play. AI just makes the problem worse. At best, with AI there's a lot of reinventing the wheel with no hope of ever doing better than merely approximating the wheel.
  - derektank 1mo ago
    > Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.
    - esseph 1mo ago
      > Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity. Wrong. You can dig a tunnel that fills in and kills you. You can drive in a huge circle to get not the house next door. You can kick out 1M lines of code a day that you don't understand and can't read. It's only productive if the work produces value.

cyanydeez 1mo ago

If this is true, almost all of big tech is becoming unproductive; so that follows.

zug_zug 1mo ago

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 blog posts for constructive criticism? Or even managers? I look at the market forces at play, and I just don't think many (any?) organization successfully create an incentive structure where performance on intangibles (specifically management) can be assessed well enough to make a bad culture into a better culture. I've worked at zero places where managers where seriously held to account for how "motivated" their employees were; when there were surveys of engagement engineers almost never truly believed they were anonymous (and why would they?) and were hesitant to give honest feedback. In short, being a CEO is a skill of crafting and debugging a machine of people, a skill that I think life gives almost no training for, and a skill that most people with that title have no awareness or aptitude for. </rant>

cryzinger 1mo ago
> 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 blog posts for constructive criticism? I think the odds of any particular article making it onto a CEO's radar are low, and the odds of them actually taking good advice to heart (let alone implementing it) are even lower. That said... I also get the impression that the shittest kinds of C-levels and VPs are disproportionately swayed by whatever opinion they last read in their daily email newsletter or heard on a five-minute podcast snippet. So at least in theory, if you were able to inject a seed of a good idea into the zeitgeist, that idea might reach the level of saturation where it turns into a form of white-collar peer pressure. Unfortunately I also think the ideas that reach the peer pressure saturation point tend to be less "be nice to your employees" and more "put shock collars on them and make them beg for their jobs," but I guess it can't hurt to try?
- sandeepkd 1mo ago
  I think sharing such ideas openly allows people to converge on similar feelings and experience which eventually leads to people experimenting these for real. We need to take into account that a lot of people reading and writing these kind of thoughts seriously may not be CEO at present but that does not prevents the possibility of them becoming the CEO's in future

joshheitzman 1mo ago

It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture.

cindyllm 1mo ago
[dead]
kevinprk 1mo ago
> It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture. Very agreed.

aesthetics1 1mo ago

AI accelerates dysfunction. It will help you get to the wrong place faster if you're already heading there. I do believe the opposite is true too. If you have a strong culture, a product or idea with promise, and a team of smart and capable people, it can move you faster in the right direction too. The problem is that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2.

claw-el 1mo ago
I think that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2 because they see ‘speed’ in ‘completing work’ as a signal in better performance. Especially since VCs are pushing for speed (https://x.com/Alfred_Lin/article/2084636778791858256 https://x.com/Alfred_Lin/article/2084636778791858256), a lot of misguided person and company who is moving fast thinks they are in group 2, when the speed they have only doubles them down group 1

lilerjee 1mo ago

How to develop good culture? Firstly remove AI.

rawgabbit 1mo ago

AI style writing; didn’t bother.

bitwize 1mo ago

The biggest stock-price hack for a CEO is: * announce that effective immediately, the company will begin its transformation to an "AI-first" organization, with AI driving most development workflows by end of year * percolate the message through upper management down to line managers that they are to assure their reports that the aim of the transformation is to augment current employees, not reduce headcount * stealthily start lopping off heads anyway

sghiassy 1mo ago

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

CSMastermind 1mo ago
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.
- mohamedkoubaa 1mo ago
  Sometimes they get it but don't know the recipe to cook it themselves so they get takeout (talent acquisition)
- danpalmer 1mo ago
  It's hard because you have to constantly make "sub-optimal" decisions. If you optimise for things you can measure, or at least see right now, you get a low performing team of high performers, or you get a collection of local maxima. Optimising for a global maximum requires making decisions that have unclear pay-off, that are harder to justify. Another problem is that one of these decisions that was actually wrong, vs one that hasn't paid off yet, look the same. I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.
  - jmalicki 1mo ago
    There's also the executive's incentives, and "I'll be gone, you'll be gone": the payoff for that is very long, and it will be hard for them to take credit, and their own tenure might not be as long as that team's.
  - antod 1mo ago
    Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem. The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers. The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team

andrii 1mo ago

It always felt like AI adoption should come from the bottom up, driven by people who are actually in a position to assess whether it makes any positive impact. Granted, that only works if your culture encourages agency in the first place.

sph87 1mo ago
Welcome to a day in the life. The company I work for prides themselves on a culture of agency and letting developers be developers. I am pushing the AI revolution but the compliance requirements and modern Luddite zeitgeist are a daily source of frustration. If the AI isn’t perfect then it’s slop. But we’ll gladly excuse the existing 2 million lines of spaghetti code because of past deadlines and lack of resources to pay down the tech debt today. Fingers crossed though. Every failure brings you one step closer to an inevitable success.
- dinkumthinkum 1mo ago
  The "Luddite zeitgeist"? :) Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it.
- johnnyanmac 1mo ago
  >But we’ll gladly excuse the existing 2 million lines of spaghetti code because of past deadlines and lack of resources to pay down the tech debt today. Well, if the AI is so efficient, it should be able to cut down on tech debt, no? Be a great way to kill two birds with one stone. The issue is that the tech debt was there for years, likely before most people started there. The AI is in their control to utilize or refuse.

jesse_dot_id 1mo ago

My company has a great culture and also AI.

ElProlactin 1mo ago

> 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 jobs, it's an employer's market.

Kinrany 1mo ago
You're listing examples where there is no market
- ElProlactin 1mo ago
  Correction: I'm listing examples where "the market" doesn't function like an ideal, healthy market. Search, social media, key SaaS markets, healthcare, insurance, etc.
  - Kinrany 1mo ago
    Right. So these are all examples of market forces being irrelevant. This isn't the market showing that culture doesn't matter: when the winner is predetermined, culture or anything else couldn't _possibly_ matter, as long as it is not so critical that getting it wrong kills the company in the most literal sense.
    - ElProlactin 1mo ago
      I understand your angle, but I'm coming from a different one: these are the "market forces" that matter today across a wide swath of industry, and, most importantly, the most lucrative industry. Capital beats culture most of the time today, so companies optimize how they use capital.
      - Kinrany 1mo ago
        Yes, my objection is to the use of "market forces", which are widely assumed to favor efficiency. What we're talking about is, pedantically, something else, something like "capital allocation game theory". A different game that is not known to favor anything in particular, as far as I know. TFA argues that good culture is important for productivity/efficiency, so any counterpoint would need to come from a game that does say something about efficiency.

dirtbag__dad 1mo ago

[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. Employment is an exchange and esp for those who work hard, they deserve the recognition. 3. “People” (aka HR) is taken seriously. The team is expected to be checked in. Those who aren’t get fired. Ideally, there’s enough in place for individuals to come to their own conclusion that they should be fired. See #1. When a req is open it’s a top priority of whoever is in charge. You can be PM-nonexistent or PM-heavy with lots of meetings and JIRA. Maybe you can accomplish all 3 above in both worlds. My experience is that process when done right moves the needle. No process leads to nonsense and process for the sake of process grinds it to a halt. It all gets better when the leaders are bought in or self aware enough to get out of the way. If you push for change long enough, and aren’t an asshole about it, just genuinely interested and motivated, there’s a chance you’ll see your vision for better culture materialize.

ls-a 1mo ago
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ahsteele 1mo ago
> If you push for change long enough, and aren’t an asshole about it, just genuinely interested and motivated, there’s a chance you’ll see your vision for better culture materialize. Throughout my career, I’ve described this as “polite persistence is how you effect change.”
- deleted 1mo ago
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- lukan 1mo ago
  Unpolitely breaching walls and doors is also how you effect change, but I prefer the polite persistence for a better long term effect as well.

linuxhansl 1mo ago

After 35 years in the industry in various capacities (from architect, engineer, VP, and different products, small and large companies, ...) I can heartily confirm this. A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least). I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software. If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.

MyHonestOpinon 1mo ago
> I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software. This is so true. We have figured out how to use an endless list of software tools. Hardly anyone is as prepared to use the new tools as software engineers.
yttt 1mo ago
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chanux 1mo ago

Does culture eat strategy for breakfast?

steinbeck 1mo ago

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syngrog66 1mo ago

smart experienced people, unencumbered

yangcheng 1mo ago

Good culture is hard to define. it's almost like you can see it and you can feel it, but can't replicate it

conartist6 1mo ago

Wow it's like: it was before, and it still is. Truly incredible!

AnonHP 1mo ago

A bit weird writing style, and I don’t know if this is Substack or the lack of proofreading. 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.

opem 1mo ago

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.

TonyAlicea10 1mo ago
I like to say AI is like the super soldier serum from the MCU. Teams take it and either become Captain America or Red Skull, it depends on what you were to begin with.
- johnnyanmac 1mo ago
  I wish. The "captain Americas" are more like Tony Stark's jury rigged suit used in the desert (for now). It's not the suit truly doing innovation, it's the man inside who knows the suit (and its many limitations/flaws) inside out. Using the strengths long enough to escape before the hunk of metal inevitably fell apart.
yttt 1mo ago
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Devyansh_raj 1mo ago

So True!

deleted 1mo ago

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wartywhoa23 1mo ago

The elephant in the room nobody's willing to notice is the asinine idea of infinite growth, which absolutely throws all opposition to using any New Shiny Tech X That Multiplies Productivity X² Times out of the window. The adherents of this infinite growth seem to be bound by some kind of blood-signed obligation to use everything and anything out there that could sustain their doomed run. Fucking know your limits. Because if scientists prove that ancient (and not so ancient) human sacrifices were in fact business boosters on some arcane quantum level of reality, you know what's coming next after the AI hype.

Kinrany 1mo ago
Infinite growth isn't a myth in general, the world economy does grow over time and for obvious reasons. But of course this doesn't necessarily translate to individual companies growing at the same rate all the time.

noisy_boy 1mo ago

Good culture is basically dont-be-an-asshole culture. Which is very hard to do. In a distant past, my team was one of the teams under a senior manager. This guy never threw his weight around, asked questions, listened to us, trusted us and instead of pretending everything was an emergency, actually cut some slack but told us in no uncertain terms when we were supposed to be full steam ahead. Below him, my manager and me and other folks were technical people who just wanted to get stuff done. It was amazing how excited we were to, not only do new stuff but improve existing stuff (sometimes by trying new things). The senior manager shielded us from the political games, his vertical got the credit for good stuff we did and we actually looked forward to coming to office. The pay sucked so I had to move on but I didn't see that experience replicated anywhere else - either the managers will just trying to slave-drive and/or there were always people trying to fuck things up for their own gain. Basically, asshole behavior.

iamflimflam1 1mo ago

In my experience, every company is great until things start going wrong. And when things start going wrong, no amount of culture is going to save you.

cindyllm 1mo ago

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syndacks 1mo ago

This is an AI written advertisement with a bunch of platitudes.

polishdude20 1mo ago

How good the culture is at a company is inversely proportional to how often the company talks about it.