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Comment by elviejo | Hacker News Reader

Second the people selected for a company are selected based on their conformance to that companies culture. So even if not a single human in Microsoft is the same, the company culture is the there.

This reminds me of an old story, might be fiction, that conveys the idea. five chimpanzees were put in a cage, bananas in the center everytime one tried to get a banana they would get cold water untill they simply stoped trying. Then one by one they replaced the chimpanzees do one one of the new ones, tried to take one of the bananas the old ones would stop him. Slowly they replaced all of them and none of the new chimpanzees, who had never received a cold shower, took the bananas.

The same with corporations.

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As a point of experience, I know of only a handful of corporations from my childhood which preserved the same culture. The vast majority are entirely different.

Most software engineering and executives jobs have a tenure of three years, and I think culture is definitely preserved for longer than that. However, it's very rarely preserved over decades.

You're citing a classic joke. The experiment doesn't replicate when people tried to test it:

https://www.answers.com/Q/Did_the_monkey_banana_and_water_sp...

As a child you were familiar with the internal company culture of multiple corporations?

Oddly enough, yes. Don't judge; nerds come in all types.

I can't say I was intimately familiar, but at the level of reading books and trade press as good enough for the statements I'm making.

You don't need a lot of depth of knowledge to know when a culture completely changed. If you go outside and see a Toyota Camry and another Toyota Camry a week later, you can't tell whether the car is the same one. On the other hand, if one day, it's a Porsche, and the next week, and 18-wheeler, you can be pretty sure something changed....

So we could define the medium live of culture as 3 times the average executive tenure?

So if in the company the average tenure is 3 years, then the culture is what has been practiced in the last 9 years... Even if the company itself is 20 years old.

In another company with tenures of average 5 years then company culture is what has been going on the last 15 years.

What do you think? Does this idea mire closely match your experience?

> Second the people selected for a company are selected based on their conformance to that companies culture.

I would agree for most companies and it's probably true for Microsoft but that doesn't really apply to Google. Google is 23 years old. 20 years ago the people who wanted to work at Google were looking for a young fast-growing company shaking things up with its search engine, a heavy focus in engineering and opportunites everywhere. Nowadays, the people who want to work at Google want to work for one of the most prestigious tech company. That tends to attract a completely different kind of person.

IMO the margins for selection can be pretty big w.r.t culture.

Also that last point probably only work if the punishment is incredibly big, and I doubt something like that exists for the scale MS operates at.

Exactly. Corporations are Ships of Theseus. Even if you change top leadership, the Board is still the same, and looking for the basically same kind of people.

That's... not the analogy.

The Ship of Theseus is a question about the nature of identity, not an answer.

That's just not true and it's plain to see if you stretch out the timeline. Is the Hudson Bay Company basically the same at it was in 17th century?

Video illustration of the 5 monkeys experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-PvBo75PDo

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