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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

After a handful of times of getting burned, I've come to interpret any official executive statement on values or culture as a sign that things are seriously screwed or about to become that way, and that it's time to bail out.

To me, culture is something that happens organically and not via directive. Leaders can shape company culture but only through their own personal demonstration of it and not by decree. Once I hear someone saying "this is how it shall be henceforth," I'm gone. They're either hopelessly naive or trying to construct a happy edifice while behaving badly.

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Reminds me of the Twilight Zone movie back in the 80's, the kid who can wish anything he wants and it comes true, and he wishes all these strangers to be his "family" and traps them in the house with them.

I'd love to hear about one of these emails reading "Hi employee, person who is totally dependent on my whim and fancy for sustinence and shelter, I've been thinking a lot about what me and my 2 friends stand for, and even though I'm not totally sure, and can't necessarily articulate it, its extremely important to me, and from now on its pretty damn important that you start standing for it too. You are an extension of me. That's why your office looks like my old apartment. Your identity has been subsumed, and to prove it I'd like to point out that your livelihood is now in a great part dependent on your allegiance to my completely undefined and arbitrary value system. So we're in this together. I am writing you to tell you everything will be fine, as long you don't. fuck. this. up. Thanks! I'll be back in touch with more specifics, or not, in the meantime just act natural."

I thought Chesky's letter was great on first reading, but I can't shake this satire from mind now. Cynical, but accurate. Well done.

Same feeling. What a nausea.

Once I moonlighted webdev for a young thugish team of car dealers and the boss would pay me according to my advancing on the "project". But the "project" was never clearly defined.

I see it as a way to assert dominance in a soft but disgusting way. If key-words like "project" or "culture" were precisely defined one would have ground to assess his condition : payment on the project, respect of the culture (like work conditions).

The boss presents himself not as a master but a minister : "Project" is a devine word that he is to interpret. We're a community. I'm just our pastor. And a cool one.

I feel like you missed the context. My understanding was "We're about to spend time discussing our culture (Core Values) at our next all hands/meeting. Let me just give you some brief background on why we as a company are doing this exercise." I don't think the goal of this note was to go into detail. That would be overkill and steal thunder from the upcoming event. It was just to contextualize why they're going to cover it a) Number 1 reason investors put huge gobs on money into AirBNB b) It's what we'll be most remembered for etc.

No.

I beg to differ. As an example, Hacker News has a culture, as laid out by Paul Graham [1]. It is not only shaped by his and moderators' personal demonstration, but also by decree [1]. Those who violate it are chided (publicly and/or systematically). Granted this is an anonymous internet forum [2] not a company, but the general principal is the same - clearly defining expectations and punishing [3] unacceptable behavior. This could perhaps go to explain the HN culture versus another online forum or the comments section of a public site.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] Considering which it should be even harder quality control.

[3] I use the term loosely.

Well considering the "culture" needs to be laid down in a document, I am surprised that AirBnB, while putting so much emphasis on culture, has not exactly told the team what it is that the heads want preserved?

>>has not exactly told the team what it is that the heads want preserved

How do you gather?

Well at least it's not in the memo. This guy illustrates it nicely via satire:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619837

Well considering the "culture" needs to be laid down in a document

The illiad was a tour de force promulgation of culture that pre-dated its written (and many times translated) forms by hundreds of years. This list of empirical examples would be mind-boggling and need not be elaborated here. Whether or not the company in question is one of the exemplars is almost beside the point.

You misunderstand, i am not supporting the claim that "culture needs to be written down", I am just saying that IF we assume that side of the argument, then the author of the memo is not doing it and thus his effort to preserve culture is futile.

Personally i feel that culture is preserved by practice and not directive. So writing down culture is a rather weird exercise, though i suppose it works as a corrective mechanism. But this memo feels like a half measure. If you want to preserve your culture, best way is to keep following it and lead by example, and you employees will keep following it, and the new ones will automatically conform to it. But if you are explicitly telling them to adhere to it, shouldn't you highlight exactly WHAT do you expect them to adhere to? If not, then what's the point of telling them to keep conforming to it?

He doesn't have to write a formal document on it, but perhaps hint with a few examples so that that reinforces what behaviour is valued.

The difference, to me, is that what Paul Graham wrote is proscriptive. He encourages or discourages specific behaviors. The typical corporate communication on culture talks about values, but does not focus on the values themselves, or how to encourage or discourage behavior.

I phrase this as you can't do culture-by-fiat. Culture is the aggregate of how people act and react.

If you want culture to be a certain way, you have incentivize people to act and react in certain ways. If you want a culture where ideas are freely expressed and discussed, then you can't penalize people for expressing unpopular ideas. If you want a culture of innovation, then you can't harshly penalize people for failed projects. If you want a culture of cooperation and collaboration, then you must reward people for it.

Everyone says the same things about the importance of values and culture, but I don't think everyone is willing to set up the systems of incentives and disincentives to back that up.

Exactly, it's about walking the walk -- non-self-consciously and without artifice. It's a product of negative verbal space: The actual values/culture are communicated by what isn't said, because they're presumed to be self-evident.

Therefore, not to be flippant but a great way to fuck up the culture is to write a memo about not fucking up the culture.

Walking the walk and talking the talk aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

An official executive statement on almost anything is a sign that X is a big problem. Otherwise they'd be focusing on something else.

I agree that you can't direct culture. But writing is one way you can transmit it. At some point, the number of CEO-minutes per employee gets pretty small, so the CEO wants to make sure everybody hears his take on it, broadcast media are what he has. He then also has to live it, of course, or it ends up being the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do horseshit that everybody has experienced.

>An official executive statement on almost anything is a sign that X is a big problem. Otherwise they'd be focusing on something else.

I disagree. I think his point was that he is choosing to focus on culture over other tasks because it is the thing he values more than anything else. Wanting to improve something doesn't mean it is inherently broken. Ex. working out when you are already in great shape.

It's funny to me how most people in this thread assume his attention to the culture automatically means it's messed up. Can you not put conscious effort into things proactively?

The Corporate Leadership shapes culture through their actions, and the tolerance of others actions.

If you have no walls on your office before taking money, and move to a corner office with a close door after, you change the culture.

If you work flex hours and let the staff do so, then change, the culture changes.

If you hire guys who wear cut-offs and have unkempt beards, but later switch to only those who are straight laced you change the culture.

Amazon everyone used to have a Door with saw horse legs for a desk. That changed along the way. And the culture changed.

You can't keep the Garage culture, when you move to a skyscraper, but you can keep hints of it if the executive team works hard to make sure it happens.

>Amazon everyone used to have a Door with saw horse legs for a desk.

No, door desks are still present at Amazon. Ironically, Amazon is large enough now that outfitting every employee with a door desk is in fact more expensive than ordering conventional desks in bulk. But they stick with the door desks because it's a good way of transmitting the frugal culture.

>After a handful of times of getting burned, I've come to interpret any official executive statement on values or culture as a sign that things are seriously screwed or about to become that way, and that it's time to bail out.

Is there anyone anywhere who has been working, say, for more than 5 years, who takes any talk of "corporate values" whatsoever as sincere?

I mean, I don't always take it as bad - it just means that they've hired business people, and the business people are... doing business things. I always figured there must be a pool of investors out there who had never had a real job, who eat that sort of thing up. I thought it was some kind of in-group thing, like salespeople all driving really expensive cars.

I've had people try to get me to write values for my company, and... while I can see the utility for myself, comparing your actions to what you say you want can be an eye-opening exercise, I really can't see how directly and publicly writing values can be seen as sincere by anyone.

Even worse than culture is when the phrase "core values" comes out. This had both.

In my experience "core values" boil down to professionalism and "culture" boils down to hard work. Once they start labeling and promoting those it tells me the company has gone from passion to "work" and the uppers can't figure out how to get it back.

(Clue: you can't company wide.)

As hackers, we should be able to look past all the heavy marketing and funding and see the idea beneath it. Airbnb has been a huge success in marketing and promotion, but what about the idea? Is the idea any good?

Culture, like passion, is best demonstrated rather than talked about. When people talk about how passionate they are, it scares me. I once worked for a company whose execs said "We will remain private because our core values of handing the firm to a new generation aren't consistent with being public." The IPO was less than a year later.

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