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Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

Define "until recently"... internal culture has definitely been an issue at companies for 20-30 years now - I can remember discussions about it quite commonly in the mid-90s. It's just good business; would you rather pay unhappy people a lot more to keep coming to work, or pay them less but have them be happier and more productive? Back in the factory days this wasn't an issue - you didn't much care if an employee came back the next day, as long as you could find someone to fill the spot on the line. But in modern companies, there's a huge cost to turnover.

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I could have done a better job with my comment and it was sort of tongue and cheek.

Of course culture concerns existed before but it was way more spelt out if you will.

When I used to ask companies "hey what is your culture like" they would say...

Well:

* We work 9-5 but when something big is due people stay to get the job done

* Our dress code is blah blah

* We have a yearly off site trip to some where

* You get this much vacation and we encourage taking it

* We have a diversity program

* We have continued education programs

* We love families and provide such and such

* If you have any problems we have a unbiased HR teams

All of these are concrete!!!

Far more useful than the ambiguous stuff Stripe is saying that almost all companies would say regardless.

None of these things tell you that much about a company's values or corporate culture. Consider that both Uber and Lyft could probably both say all of these things, despite having radically different internal cultures and values.

A company's culture is how it thinks about resolving disputes, making decisions internally, and how employees should generally behave towards one another, especially when in conflict. It's not the benefits, or dress code, or HR department.

As Uber's proven, just because everyone gets to wear t-shirts, doesn't mean they aren't jerks to each other.

Yes but they are never going to tell you the actual internal culture.

In fact I believe it isn't stating concrete things (ie a lack of formality) that may actually lead to things like Uber.

When you say this is the hours, and this your vacation time, and this is who you talk to about personal issues (aka HR) you are setting an expectation. And yeah you set clear goddamn concrete things like if you get caught harassing or fishing of the company pier we will terminate you. You tell them concretely up front.

When you don't set guidelines people can forget its work and do just plain inappropriate things!

They're telling you the actual internal culture. Your argument here seems to be since you don't believe that, they should just tell you their corporate policies instead. Those are an entirely different thing. Work hours, vacation time and HR complaint guidelines aren't corporate culture.

No it isn't. They are telling you what they want it to be.

I'm sure Uber has/had a similar manifesto. Do you think they put in the whole sexual harassment in that document.

It's like a government writing what the culture of a country should be.

You really need blind interviews to know what the culture is.

Uber did in fact have a doc with 14 key guidelines, but with drastically different contents. "Step on toes", "always be hustling" etc. The harassment issue wasn't so much a cultural value as an organizational failure that partially resulted from not valuing general respect for other employees, which when carried to its extreme means tolerating behavior that would be unacceptable at other companies. It also reportedly had a general culture of looking for ways to circumvent government rules, which is also going to undermine your ability to discourage harassment.

See: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/uber-work...

Yes, it's possible that guidelines misrepresent a company's culture. But it seems unfair and arguably, unproductive, to presume that. It's an open statement of what they want their culture to be, which seems a lot better than simply not having any goal at all.

Are you really saying you'd prefer to work for a company that doesn't think about what its internal culture and values should be?

> Are you really saying you'd prefer to work for a company that doesn't think about what its internal culture

maybe.... kidding. culture is really hard to define. But yes your point is taken but my point is by defining concrete things you can create a culture.

For example one concrete thing could be a company that says our top level executives or performers are only paid 3x than the lowest paid employee. That would indicate a lot more to me than the fluff that Stripe wrote.

> and values should be?

I absolutely care about this. This IMO is different than culture (or maybe they overlap). You can have intense high work ethic culture that have many of the big picture same values as one that does not (one example would be school systems).

You can also have very similar companies in goals and values in completely different areas of the world that have completely different culture because naturally that region has a different culture.

That being said you make valid points.

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