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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

> Given solid numbers vs somebody's gut, most managers will go with the solid numbers, even if the company has good values.

If this is true, that indicates that a company's theoretical "good values" are not being passed down to those decision-makers in a way that makes them impact decision-making.

Which means the company does not have those "good values" in the first place. They have lip service.

Values that are not practiced are not values. You are what you do, both when someone is watching and when someone is not.

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I think I see where you’re coming from, but how I interpreted it, it’s just really hard to make these decisions, and from a managers perspective its not that black and white:

- almost any change will have have people arguing for and against it

- if ‘company values’ is a trump card to prevent a change, it will be used by the people against the change

- as a manager, to still make decisions in such an environment, you’ll find yourself needing to weigh the upsides and downsides even if there are strong company values (it just puts a higher weight on certain concerns)

- as parent said, short term impact supported with numbers is easier to weigh and defend than (possible but unknown) long term detrimental impact.

Thus, I think parent is right. Even in corporates with strong company values, it’s easier to prioritize the short term proven impact over long term unproven impact. And therefore, at scale, such decisions will be made.

Still, that’s what sets a good manager from an average, no?

No different with how there are relatively few good engineers but most are average or bad?

I mean there are companies that put out good products but most are average at best.

I suppose A/B testing is bad in the way that table saws are bad — that they are dangerous and I see a lot of videos of people using them in ways that are gonna chop off their fingers, but I wouldn’t blame the table saw for it or want to take it away.

You're assuming bad intent on numbers and good intent on gut. I've seen many places that just go with gut on everything, that's worse. I like working places that get numbers on everything.

You’re making a lot of assumptions. Looking at data and reacting to it absolutely does not imply a lack of values. What if the “good values” are to look at the numbers? This would be the right thing to do for the livelihood of employees, and the right thing to do from a scientific perspective. Some “good values” include never passing dogma down over time but instead questioning assumptions and testing for results.

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