Culture! What is it good for (absolutely nothing?) | Hacker News Reader

Culture! What is it good for (absolutely nothing?)

11 pointsartsyca10 comments

Let's talk about culture y'all.

I've been perplexed by the concept of company culture ever since having the first hiring conversation at my agency in the early days as to whether a potential candidate was toxic and whether he would be hired despite of it.

We hired him and it was an unmitigated disaster which only went to show me that it only takes one rotten raisin to spoil the pudding.

Since then the primary mission has been to understand what even is toxicity, what makes a company culture, does culture even matter and where can we even find a good culture.

Believe me it goes deep but the reason is I know that organizations that design software end up designing software that reflects the organizational and communicational structure of their organization and toxic companies design toxic software in general.

I've wanted to attain the zen enlightenment state of flow and toxicity is the enemy as far as I'm concerned.

Now this is a very nuanced conversation and there are many opinions but recently I've read The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle and more than any authority on the subject it puts things into clear perspective.

Essentially there are characteristics of good culture and it generally revolves around belonging and a shared future. Things you can't fake.

A lot of the hiring in our industry is based on technology-centric or superstar-centric strategies which I've never seen succeed unless there is something more pulling us together i.e. a culture of acceptance and belonging.

I want to hear your stories. How do you define culture, what is your measure of toxicity?

Have you experienced outstanding cultures or toxic environments?

Looking at the who's hiring threads can you see through the glitter to the core of what's real vs. what's more of the same?

Do you actually prefer more of the same or are you looking for something that doesn't seem to exist anywhere?

I'd split it into 3 types:

1. Selfishness/laziness

Some people want just a job to pay the bills. They don't identify with it. Or they have other goals. They won't be good at their jobs, only doing the minimum to not get fired.

This is possibly the most common type. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It can be toxic because people who come in wanting to contribute more will be pulled back and ostracized, blamed for working at nights, and so on.

This is probably interviewed and filtered for the most. The best solution is bureaucracy, where they can perform to minimum and everyone is still happy.

2. Defensive

Bullying. Blaming. Sexism. Racism. Most of these are self-defence. The person insisting Indians are bad because they're cheap. The person bad mouthing the framework the seniors use, or juniors' tendency to keep trying new frameworks.

Sometimes it's a fix to a bad culture. Accountability is a cure to laziness, but sometimes some people are given too much accountability. Sometimes goals are too ambitious and teams continually take turns blaming each other to drag out the deadline. Quite often, this blaming is the culture, and consultants may even be brought in to participate.

The fix is usually to calm their insecurities. Bullying, blaming, racism, all seem to drop in less aggressive cultures.

3. Toxic hard work/ambition

Some work hard, and think they need to be rewarded with power, position, money, women. Sometimes they push others down to be higher. Tends to be classist. Some blame others for not working 80 hours/week, for not sacrificing, or for having a family. They wear their divorces like a medal.

These are most likely found in brand name places like FAANG or working for top tier consultants and financial institutions. Many of them aren't that good, as they tend to overwork themselves inefficiently. Some are actually from group 1 but resentful at being forced to work hard.

They tend to be the least filtered group, because many employers/interviewers want someone hardworking. Their real danger is that they tend to get promoted somewhere and burn the place down.

These are the three I'd actively filter out in a personality interview.

There are of course endless lists of toxicity. The inappropriate pervert. Some who score top grades but are too dumb to live (or stay out of prison). Some will resent people who help them. Some think getting paid is dishonest. And so on.

A lot to process here and I can't help feeling like we're overthinking it when we resort to these psychoses.

Being that one ought to believe in people over processes we ought to examine what in the process is causing these outcomes rather than assigning blame to the people?

Of course people have responsibility over the processes but by the same token they must be freed from the blame and given the chance to improve the process.

There's gotta be a game theory approach that allows for good and bad actors to coexist given the right incentives?

I worked in good to borderline psychotic cultures. It is all about management; if they condone bad behavior or not. If management ignores selfish bullying behavior then the good employees leave, the bullies stay, and productivity is history.

We take for granted that we need managers but I'm not buying it.

The manager is an anti-pattern in software and so too in organizations. What is their role anyway? Naming things is hard perhaps scheduler would be a better classname or resolver?

A managers only real job is to hire and fire the team members.

You'd think so, right? But the incentive is to show they were good hires and to quickly eliminate bad hires and if you show me the incentives I'll show you the outcomes...

There is zero incentive to hire for anything except individual performance (superstar) or technical knowledge (basically the same as above) and any success can be humbly accepted while blame can be cleverly diverted onto the team while advancing one's career and looking good to one's bosses.

A better scam has never been perpetrated and it all starts from people trusting too much as is often the case.

As the founder of a small bootstrapped team of 15, I can confirm that good managers are needed. I am already struggling at this size so I can now fully appreciate the role of good managers in larger orgs. Trust me, you need good managers. It is not only required but very critical to the success of any team and organization. There is a reason good CEOs and Executives get top dollar (and yes not all are worth the money but many are) because ultimately their job is to manage the company. Lower level managers as well have a critical responsibility to manage their own groups/teams.

The larger an organization scales the more it relies on signals rather than explicit spoken directives.

In fact the majority of communication operates on signals and we ought to know that by this millennium.

If you're not using signals to advantage well then maybe you've got a culture where people are putting out the wrong signals and they're being ignored or people are putting out conflicting signals and a lot of the wrong signals are getting picked up or any other combination that doesn't spell success.

I wonder how many founders in the industry would say the same and how many of them are captains of a barely floating ship with dozens of little holes?

And a million other questions about why victory is never guaranteed, only deserved.

Or maybe you think culture grows organically like some crazed survival of the fittest type of scenario.

I can tell you more about how that works out by examining the kitchen and the bathroom than attending any management meeting.

Talk about picking up on signals -> https://qz.com/work/1861934/study-suggests-we-can-hear-someo...

Imagine all the emotional leakage coming out of your casual workforce

As a step towards answering my own question I view culture something like a complexity issue or a proof by induction. Call it a question of human calculus.

Given n where n>=1, how can we optimize such that n+1 is maximally effective

The current corporate tropes have utterly failed us but instead of reinventing corporacy in a newer image we seem to have thrown out everything that was good about it and then replaced it with this toxic sludge of performance evaluations and weak, conflicting signalling. Anyway.. Who's reading this in the belly of some beastly code dungeon?

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