artsyca

We give off all kinds of signals in our behaviour, from how we dress to how we breathe to how we show up.

A lot of the signals are cold, aloof, passive aggressive, disgruntled, dismissive, insincere, immodest, fake, insecure, uncultured, ignorant, insensitive, etc. That's just the human condition. Even if we don't mean them as such they can be interpreted as such by other insecure, insincere, imposter syndrome types.

Put a bunch of people in a room and the signals get amplified, it's the basis of reality television.

Combined, the signals whisper "you don't belong here."

Your manager is giving you a signal by wearing running shoes to your 1:1. What does it mean? How can you interpret it?

Your founder is giving a signal by walking in with a coffee. Again what does it mean?

Your VC is giving a signal by his haircut. Your project manager is giving a signal by her exposed skin. Your developers are giving signals through their man boobs.

All of these signals are wretched and don't entice quality people to stick around because they stink of belligerence.

In an honest open and transparent environment the signals align with the values and people don't need to wallow in cognitive dissonance until their minds crack under the pressure to conform, because fundamentally people will do almost anything to be accepted by a group, and when your job depends on fitting in the company has a lot of leverage over you to essentially milk you for your efforts in exchange for keeping you around.

Downvote if you are triggered by man boobs.

I live in Japan and at first everyone was against it, now everyone is for it and a whole new industry is cropping up. HP is early to the market with their solutions and Fujitsu must also be sensing the opportunity.

The reason the tides are changing is that there is a social consciousness aspect to it now whereas before it would've been viewed differently.

There are three main kinds of cultures:

1) superstar centered

2) technology centered

3) community centered

Of these most companies adhere to 1) or 2) and a lot of the suggestions in this thread reflect that

Nobody has really tried 3) that I know of but it's the best way to get people to want to stay, duh

This is straight out of "the culture code" by Daniel Coyle

Calling a manager a boss already puts you one foot into employee mentality. The only boss is the investor. That's the team, the client's clients and the client in that order. Not everybody even knows this.

Have you ever heard of "the culture code?" it's a pretty good outline of what truly matters, and that's extreme belonging.

We give out all sorts of signals and most in the tech industry are ambiguous, toxic and uncivilized.

Learn to read the signals and you'll break through to what matters most: culture.

"Switching", get it?

I've worked in a similar communications behemoth that was very closely related to the company in question. I have first hand experience with toxic, entitled, self-dealing management culture, poor-me devs, steady stream of clueless interns, oblivious contractors.. Vapid VP's, diddling directors, the works! Definitely suspected there were spies of all colors amongst us, but hey! the coffee was great.

Too big to fail is a complete myth. It's more likely the other way round.

The original comment was just the first sentence, I felt like it spoke for itself but apparently the hive was of a different opinion. I utterly hate this place it's like a stalinist gulag.

Total bullshit. The hoodie went out with the tonsure in the middle ages. How about rope belts, are they making a comeback too?

Ok. I'll concede the hoodie has some utility for beach culture but in the office? C'mon.

Let me be the only leperous pariah in this thread to mention that the same rationale can be applied to the way we dress, as a culture of design professionals and engineers.

Because UI trends can come in and out of fashion but hoodies and T's are for life I get it.

Any ex-military in this thread understand the importance of dressing up to pass muster?

Yea I know moralistic arguments lack teeth but on some level computer science is a field founded on the concept of good faith so I like to remain loyal to the spirit of Prometheus when I'm having my liver eaten out each morning by vultures aka my project manager.

And as I mentioned in my parable the lion didn't need the mouse to bite it in order to do the right thing you know what I'm saying?

In other words a 150 year+ institution should just know better and it's a shame to think they've been sucking the world dry for that long without a second thought as to how it might affect their own bottom line.

That's definitely one way of looking at it but when you're a bank with projects in the tens of millions hinging on EmberJS, you'd think you'd be more sensitive to the plight of EmberJS development?

I mean the open source project suddenly being abandoned due to lack of a corporate sponsor would be pretty catastrophic, no?

What struck me the most is that at its heart the bank has these sorts of provisions in its constitution, ie giving back to the community and being in harmony with the environment and being relationship oriented.

It's like the lion not rewarding the mouse in that old fable, due to brand having been subverted by petty bureaucracy and middling management.

I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.

--

Ok all drama aside I can't help feeling like LISP is the best language you could have in this context because it's verbose, unambiguous, highly encapsulated and old school not to mention hardcore.

Anyone using a spreadsheet in emacs would be well versed in this sort of paradigm and I personally love lisp because it's how we cut our teeth in functional programming in university.

Not to mention it's perfectly suited to list processing..

I seriously can't believe how short sighted people can be. That's bad business.

I worked at a big bank too, you'd think they would understand about investment? No. They simply leeched off open source in the same way.

Fire cake is made with water so soldiers who went that route would get more than a pound of cake for their pound of flour.

Murphy's eighth law is contrary to every success metric. People tend to say "..but we're doing well!" and that's supposed to be a bad sign.

I wish it were acceptable to ask founders real questions about their company culture and values without being labelled a party pooper or buzzkill

It doesn't even work in tech, bro.

I thought all unicorns had to ship with wings now, standard.. Is a Decacorn a unicorn with ten heads or just ten horns?

Edit! With reference to the above comment I don't mean that these companies themselves would blacklist anyone but rather that their competitors would not hire anyone who worked there on principle to avoid that sort of association.

Like in North America you could work for Microsoft and then Google but that sort of thing doesn't always fly.

It's one of those things which are just understood but you can't very well rely on having worked for a competitor to land a job at another company

Here is one article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/konam... but I have heard of similar stories across industries

That's actually part of it my dude. Nintendo is a centuries old company they move using old boring technologies. They only go in when they know they can go in all the way.. You know what I'm saying? In their home demographic people were not ready for online gaming until recent years.

With long term investment comes a certain kind of risk appetite. It's the same reason banks haven't jumped into crypto or why so many enterprises continue using Java..

But I'm glad you used Nintendo as an example, being a software company. How about SNK or Capcom or Konami? You know what it's like getting blacklisted for jumping ship from one of these companies?

The argument has little do do with software in actual fact. What it boils down to in long-term strategy and investment.

Building things well so they may serve you for years and years is a form of investment in the long term.

There is a business philosophy credited to Japanese business but evident elsewhere too that thinking, planning and strategy should be as long term as possible, to a ridiculous extent.

I read the biography of Akio Morita, the founder of Sony and while I'm sure it was somewhat biased to laud his achievements, even from the early post-war era manufacturing recording equipment for high end use, in what can be called "start-up mode" the emphasis was on building things of very high quality that would last.

Truly this long term planning mindset is a manifestation of DRY, don't repeat yourself, and is crucial to survival of a nascent business.

The whole disposable software attitude "we'll revisit once we ship" attitude is sinking you before you ever get off the ground.

It reminds me of back in the 68k Mac days you you could set your screen to 256 colors or thousands of colors or thousands of greys, where you had to choose a tradeoff of resolution and the greyscale mode was primarily for desktop publishing applications ah QuarkXPress and PageMaker..

From their website --

> 10-Bit Simultaneous Grayscale Display

> 10-bit (1,024 tones) simultaneous grayscale display extends grayscale fidelity to the boundaries of human visual perception abilities and helps radiologists discern the finest nuances within an image.

Yes just like we can't detect the shadow DOM from the DOM but it's really there you know? I feel like my thinking is too orthogonal any more.

There's a difference between matter that's there which we can't detect as opposed to matter which isn't there which we can oh geez

Isn't dark matter something like a shadow DOM.. It's there but also not there?

Edit! Wow really feeling the love on this comment

What I mean is dark matter is different from matter we just can't detect, it's matter that should be there but we can't seem to find it

Woa. Dude games without frontiers. That's some next level shit.

The very same thing that is viewed as a strength ie oversight of everyone and everything is also a weakness in its own right --

Classical example of "do you have the power to let go of power?"

How many of us developers would take a principled stand when tasked with implementing features such as these and how many would silently comply?

I know I've folded unknowingly, adding all sorts of extra tracking including behaviour tracking to my startup's web app and looking back now I believe it's one of the reasons we ultimately failed because we broke trust with our users.