Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
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1. Predictability. Flavors of it: deliver features on time, roadmap stays mostly stable, on demand requests are known about ahead of time, business struggling or doing well transparent, tech debt / upkeep are first class citizens of planned work. All of this is project management and communication.
2. Org pays market rate and has good benefits. Employment is an exchange and esp for those who work hard, they deserve the recognition.
3. “People” (aka HR) is taken seriously. The team is expected to be checked in. Those who aren’t get fired. Ideally, there’s enough in place for individuals to come to their own conclusion that they should be fired. See #1. When a req is open it’s a top priority of whoever is in charge.
You can be PM-nonexistent or PM-heavy with lots of meetings and JIRA. Maybe you can accomplish all 3 above in both worlds. My experience is that process when done right moves the needle. No process leads to nonsense and process for the sake of process grinds it to a halt. It all gets better when the leaders are bought in or self aware enough to get out of the way.
If you push for change long enough, and aren’t an asshole about it, just genuinely interested and motivated, there’s a chance you’ll see your vision for better culture materialize.
Throughout my career, I’ve described this as “polite persistence is how you effect change.”
This is so important. One of the things that kills company culture before the company even takes off is getting a sense from the founders that they're just trying to fool desperate/clueless people into working for them for less than what they're worth.
The startups that actually succeed have the philosophy "find the best people and pay them a lot". All the successful unicorns and decacorns over the last 15 years have a reputation of paying people well. There is literally not one startup I can think of that succeeded but has a reputation of underpaying.
And if you're unable to pay employees well then you're simply not well-capitalized enough and should drop the project.
Paying above-market rates is walking a tightrope. On the one hand, experienced employees who are well-versed in your systems and your organization are indeed worth more than market-rate (i.e. someone new), and compensating them as such will retain them. On the other hand, it also retains poor performers, who you want to steer to finding roles elsewhere. Being ruthless about firing fast is one option, but it's a deal with the devil - it erodes psychological safety among people who stay unless the firing is unanimously desired and there is a consensus among everyone who remains that it was necessary. So if you handle the firing wrong, you affect performance and social cohesion everywhere. If you pay market-rate, it's easier to just make someone miserable until they self-select out and find work elsewhere.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), all successful startups pay above-market because equity compensation in the right company can be a life-changing amount of money. So most successful startups seem to successfully walk that tightrope.
If paying people less encourages poor performers to find roles elsewhere, it encourages your high performers to do this even more probably...
Most software engineers are relatively well-paid compared to the wider labor market, even the engineers who are "underpaid". Kahneman's research showed that once you have enough money to pay your bills, making more than that has rapidly diminishing returns for your happiness. It's much more important to fit in - like your boss, like your coworkers, like your work, be recognized, have good work-life balance. None of that really requires above-market compensation.
When a firm pays below-market rates, it's a sign of one of two things: either they're abusing people who can't find work elsewhere, or people are happy to stay in spite of it. The latter are often really good places to work.
HN loves to complain about how money ruined the software industry. Let the people who will chase a raise from $180k to $210k go elsewhere. Let the people who want their moonshot at life-changing wealth go talk to a VC. There are other opportunities for people who realize that money isn't everything in life.
"Above-market rate" is an oxymoron. If someone is offering to pay you above the prevailing best rate then obviously you're going to sell to that buyer and it becomes the new market rate.
I have seen tech companies flourish which had tech, or tech-adjacent leadership. I've never seen a really good tech company that was lead by an MBA, a "vibe bro", or someone looking to get rich quick. It almost always comes from a genuine passion to solve problems in a certain domain.
One key point is also hires, hiring slowly and not keeping bad hires around. Bad hires really pull everyone down and it's really difficult to work around bad coworkers.
I personally actively filter out companies who don't use Slack. The way communication is done in a company reflects practically every company decision. (Conway's Law)
Maybe you have only worked in start ups? I have certainly seen products fail or partially fail because of tech debt. One product was extremely unproductive to work on because of a patched together architecture. To the extent that bugs were introduced easily but took so long to turn around that customers left the product and told us that was the reason.
Do you actually mean "don't use Slack" or actually just "use Teams"? If the former, I don't think that makes a lot of sense unless you own a lot of Salesforce stock. There's a number of Slack alternatives that pretty much deliver the same experience.
But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism?
Or even managers? I look at the market forces at play, and I just don't think many (any?) organization successfully create an incentive structure where performance on intangibles (specifically management) can be assessed well enough to make a bad culture into a better culture. I've worked at zero places where managers where seriously held to account for how "motivated" their employees were; when there were surveys of engagement engineers almost never truly believed they were anonymous (and why would they?) and were hesitant to give honest feedback.
In short, being a CEO is a skill of crafting and debugging a machine of people, a skill that I think life gives almost no training for, and a skill that most people with that title have no awareness or aptitude for. </rant>
I think the odds of any particular article making it onto a CEO's radar are low, and the odds of them actually taking good advice to heart (let alone implementing it) are even lower. That said... I also get the impression that the shittest kinds of C-levels and VPs are disproportionately swayed by whatever opinion they last read in their daily email newsletter or heard on a five-minute podcast snippet. So at least in theory, if you were able to inject a seed of a good idea into the zeitgeist, that idea might reach the level of saturation where it turns into a form of white-collar peer pressure.
Unfortunately I also think the ideas that reach the peer pressure saturation point tend to be less "be nice to your employees" and more "put shock collars on them and make them beg for their jobs," but I guess it can't hurt to try?
Right now I'm happy where I work, but I think most people recognize that so much can change almost literally overnight (either in terms of the employer still wanting to employ someone, e.g. sudden layoffs, or in terms of whether it sucks to work somewhere, e.g. massive policy changes like a job where you're comfortably remote suddenly trying to make you commute or even move). Until I'm at a point where I'd be able to retire if something like that happened, I need to continue to be aware of how to spot the red flags at prospective employers.
No, but the CEO will absolutely seek out my recommendations and I do read random blog posts
I love companies like that! Everything is documented, stuff just works, CI builds...
If something is broken, you just open ticket, and responsible person takes care of it! You do not have to investigate when Judy returns from holidays...
With remote work I can spend more time with kids..
"Company culture" usually means you have to listen to shitty stories, provide social life for some lonely people, and do unpaid emotional labour!
And do not dare to say anything even remotely controversial, in this "open" environment that "foster communications"!
Yes, a company culture is about dealing with other humans. Such as having empathy and compassion for your coworkers, help each others grow and go through tough times. Removing the human aspect from companies is how you end up with soulless environments where problems aren’t address
I remember many years ago companies used to advertise their "joel score" (not quite the same thing but related) to attract employees.
This is something which I think investors could also use as an indicator of company quality.
A lot of cultural problems also have quite easy fixes they just require shining a light on specific abuses of executive power which simultaneously hurt employees and destroys shareholder value. There is a lot more of this than I think people realize.
>A lot of cultural problems also have quite easy fixes they just require shining a light on specific abuses of executive power which simultaneously hurt employees and destroys shareholder value. There is a lot more of this than I think people realize.
What do you mean? Who would "shine this light", on which executive, and who would they whistle-blow to exactly, the board? Short of embezzlement or sexual harassment (and not even all sexual harassment cases) I can't think of any cases where calling out an executive's behavior won't result in immediate retaliation. This is a genuinely tricky problem, but most of all I get the sense executives would rather own the wrong decision than have a subordinate get credit for swaying them to the right decision.
The irony of writing this comment for a post that made the front page of one of the most widely read aggregators in tech, in said comment section
Indeed, but the CEO is Queen Promethium, and you are just one of the people she's transformed into a bolt to go into her infernal machine.
I think its a way to speak out and get it out there, than stay unspoken. Author as well others who share same opinion get some validation that they are not only ones.
The CEO (or at least the founder) created and cultivated the culture of the company thus far. If the culture is bad, they are the single largest reason why.
You are right in that execs won't seek out the blog article which criticizes their strategy... unless they actually want to steelman against their own position (which is a very useful activity but few people do it).
But the CEO doesn't need to find it on their own. They surround their self with a Board, investors, sales people, managers / leadership team, people from their MBA program, etc. the article just has to plant a seed which grows somewhere in that ecosystem.
That said, the article may not be right. The largest and most successful companies in the world aren't the ones with the best company culture. They simply work in industries where the money is so prolific that the people who want to work in the industry are already highly motivated. The CEO doesn't need access to this information because it isn't true; it simply tickles your cognitive biases.
Good question.
Personally, it feels good to read these when stuck in a bad situation/culture. Feels good (relieving) to write too. I don't really believe these reach and/or change the relevant category of people.
Demotivating work aside, that also seems like a complete dead-end to me, because somebody else who focused their company around it will do it better and cheaper (even before considering subject-specific VC money).
As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.
The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers.
The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team
A lot of people hate it, but if you have a rotation, that will force this person to deal with what they create during their rotations, and the operational issues will be an explicit part of your job when you're dealing with them.
When it kind of goes to random people, the conscientious people who fix the bugs and operational issues look unproductive, and the aggressive people throwing slop over the wall who never bother look great.
Forcing this through a rotating cast, and having other people not worry about it unless management decides it's too much for one person and they need help during this rotation, really avoids some of the most toxic outcomes around this.
On-call doesn't have to mean someone is getting paged at 3am. It does mean everyone rotates through, and it is clear who has the monkey, so you don't have passive-aggressive vs. conscientious behavior hiding issues like that.
Different to corporate jobs those teams spend tremendous amounts on scouting, analysis etc.. They don't just look for the best player but also one who fits as a person.
I think the core issue is that management hasn't picked this up yet and understanding team chemistry etc is totally undervalued. I'd argue this is partly due to this being hard to measure and very hard to do.
This might just be hanlon's razor and I'm overthinking it, but part of me wonders if it's less "executives don't get it" and more "executives do not want to get it".
I've seen managers in my career bend over backward to protect people who were outright abusive to their coworkers but were individually very productive. Those managers didn't go very far. Your team is not a car collection.
Went from IPO hopeful to struggling to position to sell the company now that it was obviously down-trending. Everyone else worth their salt left within a year. Biggest takeaway was how effective everyone was despite not having a traditionally strong engineering background, just because everything traveled so fast because everyone knew everything about the product and everyone was happy and eager to talk to one another, and how quickly that disappeared.
I do believe the opposite is true too. If you have a strong culture, a product or idea with promise, and a team of smart and capable people, it can move you faster in the right direction too.
The problem is that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2.
Well, if the AI is so efficient, it should be able to cut down on tech debt, no? Be a great way to kill two birds with one stone.
The issue is that the tech debt was there for years, likely before most people started there. The AI is in their control to utilize or refuse.
* announce that effective immediately, the company will begin its transformation to an "AI-first" organization, with AI driving most development workflows by end of year
* percolate the message through upper management down to line managers that they are to assure their reports that the aim of the transformation is to augment current employees, not reduce headcount
* stealthily start lopping off heads anyway
Very agreed.
Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture.
Now what?
As for your "now what", companies with a bad culture will be at a competitive disadvantage. Their efforts to wring more productivity out of their broken culture usually make the culture worse. My advice would be to leave ships once you realize that they're sinking. (That doesn't make you a rat!)
What might be more pointed, instead of pointing to the "useful effects of good culture" why not have actual tactics on how to reform or remove bad management and preserve and expand good management?
But I don't think my comment is as hopeless as all that. There are places with better culture; all other things being equal, they should be out-performing places with bad culture. That means that they should be more likely to hire, and more likely to pay better. So, if you're in a place with bad culture, don't just sit there. Go looking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
The idea that we shouldn't be able to vote for our bosses is completely ridiculous. If we had truly collaborative workplaces it would probably unlikely another $50 trillion worth of value once you give workers the ability to exercise their voice (passionate workers want stable working environments, if executives are never held accountable by their subordinates how can we argue such an unfree system is worth preserving?).
The power of your vote is proportional to the value you bring.
A while back I threatened to quit because I had a team dynamic that was untenable. I made a management change mandatory.
I got a new boss. The old boss was later terminated.
(And sometimes just leaving really is the best step!)
A vote would in turn provide a mechanism to prevent such abuse. The boss works for the people not for their boss. Likewise the boss is no longer bound to the whims of their own boss. Their boss is the people below them. A group they will inevitably rejoin with new found appreciation for the troubles of management.
Congrats as a single individual doing something, LMK when it amounts to real material change like obtaining a pension, or securing more PTO, or getting better health insurance.
Shimman is talking about what could be.
Responding to "hey, we could make our workplaces better by making it possible to elect our bosses rather than having them imposed on us as absolute dictators within the workplace" with "but you can already choose your boss—all you have to do is abandon all your coworkers, your salary, your routine, and likely your home and geographical region to go pick a different unaccountable absolute dictator" just shows that you aren't even having the same conversation that shimman is having.
And the worst part is you don't even seem to recognize it.
You got yourself into an extremely lucky position one time, and now that's made you think that's a viable solution for everyone who has problems with their bosses—and that anyone who thinks otherwise is just "not bringing value".
The only possible way to make our workplaces systemically better is by collective action. Unions. Workplace democracy. Stronger labor protections.
Everything else is just crab-bucket mentality.
Depends on the job market, sadly. No way in hell people are doing this unless they already have "fuck you money" or are truly the best in their field (which usually comes with "fuck you money"). Otherwise, people who can't t afford to take 6-12 months off a job can't really do that.
If it's publicly traded you get a say... It's must that in this case votes are in fact, bought. And we're out voted on the topic of company direction.
Except the market is full of proof this isn't true. You can still do very well with a broken culture if you have an oligopoly, through tactics like vendor lock-in, by buying up upstart competition early, using VC funding to capture the market by selling below cost, etc.
And now that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been laid off from high-paying jobs, it's an employer's market.
Search, social media, key SaaS markets, healthcare, insurance, etc.
Capital beats culture most of the time today, so companies optimize how they use capital.
TFA argues that good culture is important for productivity/efficiency, so any counterpoint would need to come from a game that does say something about efficiency.
It's short sighted yes... And that's the point once your means of making money is not tied to societal productivity.
A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least).
I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software.
If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.
This is so true. We have figured out how to use an endless list of software tools. Hardly anyone is as prepared to use the new tools as software engineers.
It quotes a problematic statement and then after one or two paragraphs, it says this:
> But here is an important thing that many people forget:
> There is no better productivity hack than a great culture. No AI tools will provide bigger productivity gains.
> I’ve unfortunately seen and heard this sentence quite a few times, either directly or from an engineer or engineering leader who has reported that to me.
So the problematic sentence is the one that talks about a great culture being the biggest productivity hack? I had to scroll up again and see what it was referring to.
In a distant past, my team was one of the teams under a senior manager. This guy never threw his weight around, asked questions, listened to us, trusted us and instead of pretending everything was an emergency, actually cut some slack but told us in no uncertain terms when we were supposed to be full steam ahead. Below him, my manager and me and other folks were technical people who just wanted to get stuff done.
It was amazing how excited we were to, not only do new stuff but improve existing stuff (sometimes by trying new things). The senior manager shielded us from the political games, his vertical got the credit for good stuff we did and we actually looked forward to coming to office. The pay sucked so I had to move on but I didn't see that experience replicated anywhere else - either the managers will just trying to slave-drive and/or there were always people trying to fuck things up for their own gain. Basically, asshole behavior.
The adherents of this infinite growth seem to be bound by some kind of blood-signed obligation to use everything and anything out there that could sustain their doomed run.
Fucking know your limits.
Because if scientists prove that ancient (and not so ancient) human sacrifices were in fact business boosters on some arcane quantum level of reality, you know what's coming next after the AI hype.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Giving junior devs or non-devs what is essentially automated stackoverflow copypasta on steroids only amplified all the downsides of inexperience that we already learned well over a decade ago.
Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. An inexperienced person delegating what they don't understand to AI produces more bugs, not less.
Those mindlessly copying from stackoverflow were in a similar situation, but only because they ignored or didn't understand the warnings from the discussion. You're rolling the dice if you expect AI to explain itself, as it can only ever know at most what it scraped from (stackoverflow and poorly documented github repos).
As it was not too long ago, searching on stackoverflow was already a hail mary play. AI just makes the problem worse. At best, with AI there's a lot of reinventing the wheel with no hope of ever doing better than merely approximating the wheel.
Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.
Wrong.
You can dig a tunnel that fills in and kills you.
You can drive in a huge circle to get not the house next door.
You can kick out 1M lines of code a day that you don't understand and can't read.
It's only productive if the work produces value.
To me it is obvious that an org with a good culture will be more able to identify and reach its targets than a dysfunctional org lacking trust and safety.
we can argue about how much more productive you get, but, it's definitely not the same as what we had before