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Comment by tawtawtaw | Hacker News Reader

Culture is over-rated. Covid is an opportunity to question why businesses are structured how they are, in particular whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results. I say this because work from home leads to rethinking work as a place you go to put in time, as it has been at least since the industrial revolution. And reimagining work as a series of outcomes someone wants to pay you for, because they see value in outsourcing them to you. But instead, companies will just make online versions of the same corporate BS that goes on in the office.

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I don't understand how this can be the top comment. This is just a string of generalizations without any references, not even anecdotes, or explanations. Someone venting steam, essentially.

Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh.

Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

What corporate BS?

There are lot of fringe political folks on HN that would prefer everyone shuts up and works. Or that want to turn everything into a moral crisis.

But to them I say, at least we can vote where we want to whittle our lives away, right? Choose the people and products we work with and on.

You're free to work at "do your work" Coinbase if you want. Or "everyone is now a vegan" WeWork.

You can choose to build spy tech, ad pipes, weapons systems. It's all up to you.

People complaining about culture (or defending it) might be making different choices than you.

You're so deep in the BS yourself you can't even see it anymore? Office politics BS is commonplace and it's part of human nature in a place where humans interact socially, but that becomes a lot harder when you're working remotely (no references to give you about this statement, but I believe a lot of people have been saying this in the past few months). Can you really not believe that people can do work without a manager telling them to? I think that if that's all you know, yeah, can be difficult to adjust... but I am fairly certain most people would adjust just fine to a situation where they are their own manager: they have a job to do, a target to achieve, and they have to figure out how to get there. Some level of administration is always needed, but that doesn't require a manager as we normally have them. Just another worker whose focus is on metrics/people.

I think you’re fighting straw men here, but a worker whose focus is on metrics/people sounds like a good definition of a manager.

I manage a team of 20. A few people are good at and enjoy being independent and don’t need much management, but most people fall apart and actually end up with a lower job satisfaction. I’m not saying they all desire micromanagement (though I have one high needs but high output developer that enjoys work more with weekly meetings and daily checking, as a stress reliever), but they all appreciate good management as it reduces unnecessary work, wasted effort, and results in a higher quality product.

I started a company and was always a “leave me alone to do it my way” individual contributed, and it took a huge amount of effort on my part to remove that bias of how I like to work, so I could effectively manage people who don’t work best that way.

Culture by the way, is just a common ground tying people together to make everything a little less transactional. I have some transactional people and I tend to be that way myself, but most of our team enjoys shared memories, values, etc. they are the ice breaker between most people that otherwise wouldn’t have the desire or reason to hang out, but are forced to by work. Most people actually recognize this as a tool and happily play the game.

You nailed it. A good manager will adapt his/her approach to the individuals he/she manages. A bad manager will try and force all individuals to become identical clones.

Yea, the top comments on this thread read like a bunch of ICs who don’t understand what management does.

Yes, you have more time to be productive from home but since you aren’t sitting with your team all day, your manager has to work harder making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing and they’re all pushing in the same direction. Culture is the norms of how that happens, so it makes sense to hire people who know how to do that well.

A good manager is worth his/her weight in gold. The problem is that 90% of managers I have worked with are not good managers. I was a manager (and ran my own business with employees as well) for 10+ years, have worked 25+ years in the industry, and have more than once helped not-very-good managers get their projects back on track. The #1 problem I have seen is managers not understanding what their job really is. The result is a manager who has a negative productivity impact on the team he/she is managing. Add a few layers of bad managers on top of that, and you have a dysfunctional company.

The flip side is forced culture. Watch some videos of corporations making workers sing and essentially peer pressure everyone in participating was cringeworthy.

Some people just want to go to work and do their job.

>I don't understand how this can be the top comment.

Know the audience. Think of the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with in a given tech workplace - they make up about 75% of the users here. The other 25% are broken into aspiring entrepreneurs, reasonable ICs and Reddit migrants who are still trying to find their feet.

>Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh.

Same crowd will balk at any suggestion around deriving accountability quantitatively. These rugged individualist coder wolves just need to be unleashed to let their genius flow, man.

>Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

See above. Why would the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with want a workplace that promotes working with others?

> Think of the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with in a given tech workplace - they make up about 75% of the users here.

Curious, why do you think so? Its hard for me to see any correlation with social/tech news consumption and being difficult to work with.

Not agreeing or disagreeing with the post you are replying to, but the people who comment here are different to the general people who consume here.

Putting aside whether there’s a correlation, forums develop their own unique cultures—a product of the moderation system, unspoken norms, and the specific individuals who comment there. A different forum might be discussing the exact same articles in a very different way.

According to your model, you are part of the audience too. So I assume (using your logic) that you are difficult to work with too or is still trying to find your feet? I (for one) doesn’t fit in your model. And I am also pretty sure I am not the only one. So I recommend perhaps adjusting your model to fit reality better?

>That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

There is a difference between everyone being cold and taking it to such an extreme, everyone has to essentially be, ironically, the same robot in the rainbows and sunshine "work family".

>Well that gave me a good laugh.

Pulling out random numbers (goes for grandparent and your comment) doesn't help. Many people work in 1:5 manager:dev overhead, often more, due to multiple management layers all applying pressure on the bottom level. Not everyone is mentally a child that still needs to be babysat while an adult. Heck, college, university and all that are exactly there to ensure one is self-sufficient to an extend you don't need to manually moderate their every move.

It is fairly ironic you're devolving into the same behavior you accuse GP of, when a much more intellectual discussion can be held.

Corporations always give you a false image that they "care about their employees", "saving them world/environment", "mission", etc. Just stop the marketing BS, they don't care about anything else than just making money at any cost, it is all an upfront.

Even improving morale has an ulterior motive- to boost productivity for profit. It is fine as corporations' sole purpose is to give shareholders value, but don't color it around HR bs to fool people. As least most companies are this way, the exceptions are few. People are not dumb once they realize they are disposable and start smelling the bs.

I think why most people complain about management is due to their false sense of leadership and character, pretending to be virtuous, while stabbing workers in the back (i.e. hypocrisy). There are not many good managers or employers- most lack real leadership or morals

If by "culture" you mean, a group of people with the same attitudes and goals- there is no denying that humans work better in groups. Just keep the "do-good" BS out please...unless you really meant it by embodying those ideals- living as example.

The moment a company tells the world how “caring it is” or how much it “cares about it’s employees”, run (don’t walk) away from it as fast as possible. The companies I have worked for that actually cared about its employees never told anyone about it because it was an unspoken rock solid part of the culture. As in “of course you need to make sure employees are happy to stay. Anything else would be stupid!”.

> Culture is over-rated.

Many years ago I experienced a company lose an authentically good culture, and turn into an average shitty one in less than a year. I have to disagree.

Just because the average shitty ones still talk about culture and pretend they have it, doesn't mean a good culture isn't important.

Culture is an overused and overrated term that means nothing without detailed context.

When people say “culture” they usually mean...

- My company treats developers like rockstars; everyone else minus executives is treated like shit. “Ninjas & unicorns!”

- My company doesn’t have HR or need it. “Who needs HR? It’s only for women, losers and SJWs.”

- My company doesn’t have security and risk processes for handling user data or anything else. “Everybody’s root!!!”

- My company has cool perks like a game room, free beer, no vacation limits and a chef on staff; but everyone is underpaid compared to market. “I know they pay me 85k to be a senior dev but at least I got beer!”

Yeah, my example had none of that stuff.

It was a place where people were made to feel welcome, got listened to, were trusted, cared about and helped each other, were free to be themselves, could freely and honestly express their opinions to execs without repercussions etc.

People were given chances to grow into new roles, and their knowledge from the previous ones was valued (no roles were looked down on). It had the right amount of management (not too much, not too little), and they took good management seriously as something to empower people rather than control them.

A lot of it was built from the ground up rather than imposed from above, and there was not a lot of money thrown at it.

All that can be destroyed much faster than it can be built.

To me, good culture means:

- People are comfortable giving and receiving feedback

- Expectations and priorities are open and honest

- Work/life balance is seriously respected

- Managers serve their reports, not the other way around

Culture is (per definition) the unspoken rules that is behind everything people in the culture believes in and do without controversy. You can’t not have a culture.

I've worked a number of companies where a culture formed spontaneously, and it was both productive and motivating with a real sense of camaraderie.

I've also worked at companies where the company created a culture with artificial team building tricks, and without exception it led to a shitty environment where HR and political schemers screwed over both the company and their fellow employees for petty gain.

Let's look at the other side:

I run process oriented companies

Would I add a beer keg-refrigerator aka "kegerator" to keep some 25 year olds from considering other companies for 3 months longer than they would anyway? sure

Would I allow the work place to be used as a surrogate for their social causes? no - actually maybe if it needed to court advertisers all the time, but otherwise no because that was not the point of the business entity.

Would I hire an operations person to plan social things for employees to look forward to because I don't care about that at all? maaaaaaaaaybe

I never needed that stuff, clock in, clock out, nobody is really on the clock just meet your goals

For me, location is more important. What can you do in walking distance after work? I tend to keep my social circles separate, I don't want my colleagues or employees around.

The jobs I loathed the most had car-only commutes to office parks.

The jobs I enjoyed the most were in trendy parts of towns.

I think the people that attracts are heavily correlated and makes the culture on its own.

> Would I add a beer keg-refrigerator aka "kegerator" to keep some 25 year olds from considering other companies for 3 months longer than they would anyway? sure

This has extra benefits too. You don't want to turn the office into a bar for quite obvious reasons, but having it in the office makes it convenient. A lot of senior will skip off-site events because they have a family to go back to. But one beer and leave? Sure.

I do think "culture" is overused in the MBA buzzword sense sometimes, but even I know having a kegerator or [dis]allowing political activism on campus has absolutely nothing to do with culture.

Are you sure? The only thing I see is that the word culture is not conveying a shared message and is therefore failing at language. Another person in this thread said something similar to you "Culture is an overused and overrated term" while defining it similarly to me.

Why speak in absolutes when it absolutely is not conveying a shared message.

I think it sounds like you have built a great culture there, adding a beer tap would not be your culture so don't do it, but it sounds like you have worked hard to create and nurture a culture I bet your staff love.

> The jobs I enjoyed the most were in trendy parts of towns.

Same here. In a way, location can be thought of to be one of the most concrete parts of office culture. In NYC, where I've spent a lot of my work life, it's amazing how much of a proxy office location was for founder style. For some founders, a chic location wasn't prioritized or seen as ROI positive. For others, it was the exact opposite.

All I can say is that for the former category, the value-add generally far outweighed the outlay for a very crucial and formative period of its life. At a certain size, logistical concerns like price per square foot and available commercial inventory become a lot more pressing concerns.

If you consider it carefully your absence of “culture” is in itself a culture. Just one that eschews those other things.

Good idea, I would absolutely love to add that to my "culture documents", I enjoyed the breath of fresh air that Netflix's old notorious one conveyed

Has NFLX employee culture become more mainstream?

You can’t not have a culture. All you can do is to hire people who’s values match the culture you want, and organise the reward/incentive structures to match.

> Just because the average shitty ones still talk about culture and pretend they have it, doesn't mean a good culture isn't important.

Exactly. Companies that have terrible culture project the need for a good one to get out in front of the accusation that their leadership failed in actually establishing a good one.

> whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results

Absolutely agreed. Look at how effective Valve has been with a non-hierarchical culture!

Well despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.

Also, when they did deliver a Half Life game, it was incredibly well executed and novel in a way that could simply not happen at a different company with a different culture. Normally I'd dismiss claims like that as puffery, but here it's concrete: no other big studios have invested in a VR game at that scale. And, veering into less quantitative observations, I haven't seen any VR game—and not many "normal" games either—with the level of attention to detail that Alyx got.

I've listened to some of the design commentaries for the game, and I was really impressed at how much time, effort and user testing Valve was willing to put in to every detail. VR is a new medium, and it's impressive to see an organization learn how to take advantage of it so thoroughly. It takes a special culture to make space for people to try things and indulge in perfectionism—takes a lot of money too, of course, but other AAA studios have just as much but don't hew to the same standard.

I know Valve's approach is controversial and I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's clearly doing something right that very few other companies are. I've seen small teams work in ways like that, but never at scale. One of these days I'd love to work at a company trying something like that. (Probably not in video game development though :P.)

Do you know if there are any good articles on Valve's non-hierarchical culture?

Not sure if you've seen their handbook? Search for "valve handbook" - it's an internal thing, but someone leaked it a few years ago and now it can be easily found, it explains their culture very well.

The Valve handbook doesn’t reflect the reality at Valve. Not all employees have the power to fire other employees or decide the salary of other employees. The employees that do have all the power and the rest compete with each other to build beneficial buddy relationships with them.

Actually, this isn’t true. In The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx, Valve talked about how their 10 year dead period where no single player games were released was caused by their nonhierarchial structure. Half-Life 3 alone was started three times since HL2:E2 and people got bored and stopped touching it. They did work on several original titles and ended up cancelling them due to tech issues or boredom.

Alyx, once it gained steam, ended up turning into a hierarchical project and the largest in the company history, and was the only way Source 2 ever got finished (since they now had people waiting on it to get the game working). And it worked, as we finally now have proof that VR is a great way to tell stories. The book is excellent, and goes on sale often on Steam.

(A decent summary of the book is here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...)

Hierarchical or not, keep in mind Valve was making an enormous amount of money the whole time. Steam is, by far, their most profitable business.

They are also extremely selective when it comes to hiring (they are fairly small but get applicants from literally all over). So that some approach worked for Valve won't necessary work for RandomCo Inc where software is viewed as a cost center, simply because they can't attract the same caliber of talent.

I was being ironic, but decided to write the comment in an ambiguous way as was honestly curious which tack HN would take.

The Alyx story you link is probably a great example of the greatest strength being diversity: where diversity often means breaking your own rules when appropriate.

Even the Roman Republic's Senate reserved the power to appoint an omnipotent dictator in times of need.

Are there any more examples like that? I think that possibly Valve is an exception rather than a prediction for the future - they're obviously an incredibly successful company, but I haven't heard about other large companies with similar model.

I know Github had kind of similar culture in the beginning, with flat hierarchy, but that changed at some point. Then there's Zappos which is famous for their holacratic approach, but earlier this year I've read some articles saying that internally they move away from that model.

There aren't, and as you guessed, they're exceptions for a reason.

Valve has a strong hierarchical structure, where informal relationships makes the decisions that would (in other companies) be made by people in formal positions. All groups of people have implicit hierarchies. Some have explicit hierarchies as well.

I’m with you... I’m quite tired of hearing about culture in the work place. I’m hoping it was mostly tied up in SV which I am departing from soon.

To the SV startups I have interacted with (both myself and through friends) culture can be used as the excuse to hire “people like us”.

Yes. If you have to talk about culture, you don't have it.

Culture is like macro economics - it's an illusion made up from micro economics. Likewise it's individuals' behaviour and interactions that will form a culture, and though you can put policies in place - like with macro economics - to try to influence maximize certain qualities - however that kills off nuances, flexibility, and variance of individual that's necessary for sovereignty to maximize the individual's contributions. A person will either blend in, integrate successfully into a culture - evolving it hopefully for the better - or their behaviour will lead them to being exiled unless they can learn, grow; my worry has always been if toxic, manipulative individuals capture the review and management positions - which is why I'm interested in non-hierarchical structures, however some still needs necessary; the never-ending tension between liberal and conservation, more hands on vs. more hands off approaches.

Bell Laboratories had a pretty cool culture from the interviews I've listened to.

It is also interesting how culture changes from 6 people startup to 600 people mid-sized company. Culture is best when its pull rather than push; when a large company imposes culture on you, it is natural to feel that its foreign and you're forced to adopt it. Compare this with a small group of people that you truly enjoy being with, solving problems, expressing frustrations and listening to their woes - you can create a microculture of your own which I only see as a positive thing. I do think that its better in a physically close setting like an office-space than being completely remote.

> favour of individual accountability and a focus on results

What results? Sure, making money is the final result we want to measure, but how do you determine how much each person contributes to the bottom line?

So we need to set objectives so we can measure results, then we need some way to measure results, some way to compare results across different objectives, some way to evaluate if our objectives and measures are working....

And suddenly you have management and 'culture'

I don't understand people who say we just need to 'focus on results'.... that is even more useless as saying "we just need to focus on making money"

We all know the end result we want (making money), but the hard part is figuring out how.

Take the example of a basketball team, where at least the objectives and measurement technique is well known... you have to score more points than the opponent. Even then, putting together a team is not simple. Which combination of players will produce the best outcome? Which players are good but on bad teams? What strategy should the team employ?

Your concept of work being a series of contractual outsourcing arrangements already IS how our economy works. The issue is that most things we create can't be made by one person, so the contract to make something is subcontracted out to many people who sign contracts with the one main contractor... and suddenly you have a company.

There is a difference between the management many people endure, and the management that both you and the GP strive for, which doesn't become apparent if you only look from the angle of "no management to start with".

The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete.

When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation.

Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)

That isn't what the comment said, though... they weren't complaining about a particular type of manager, or company culture, but the idea entirely.

Culture is overrated ? I have worked at Oracle and Google and I strongly believe the culture and values define the giant difference between how these companies operate

More than that, once you have more than 2 people in a room, a culture will develop.

You can either let it grow organically or try to guide it at least a bit. And there is a reason we study for intellectual endeavors and train for physical ones.

I'm curious how you define culture that you call if over-rated.

To me, culture is the individual accountability and focus on results that you describe, plus humility, freedom to take initiative, mentorship, empathy, perseverance, personal growth, conflict resolution... and this absolutely is defined by the people you choose to work with and behavior of the leadership.

I used to be in your camp and think culture was a ridiculous thing to focus on, now I'm in the camp where I believe it's the most important part of successful teams.

Culture is (per definition) the underlying unspoken rules that makes a group of people behave the way it does. So what you are describing isn’t culture. They are actually examples of rules you could have in a culture.

Culture is all important. Not only for companies. Religious wars are culture wars. Left/right politics are culture conflicts. Discrimination are culture clashes. Culture is the underlying, unspoken rules that guide everything a company/country/group of people do. You can’t not have a culture. So make sure you have a good one.

This is surely going to happen. It's going to take decades but sure it will. And when this will be the norm current structure will not make any sense to that generation.

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