Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh.
Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.
What corporate BS?
Know the audience. Think of the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with in a given tech workplace - they make up about 75% of the users here. The other 25% are broken into aspiring entrepreneurs, reasonable ICs and Reddit migrants who are still trying to find their feet.
>Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh.
Same crowd will balk at any suggestion around deriving accountability quantitatively. These rugged individualist coder wolves just need to be unleashed to let their genius flow, man.
>Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.
See above. Why would the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with want a workplace that promotes working with others?
Curious, why do you think so? Its hard for me to see any correlation with social/tech news consumption and being difficult to work with.
Yes, you have more time to be productive from home but since you aren’t sitting with your team all day, your manager has to work harder making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing and they’re all pushing in the same direction. Culture is the norms of how that happens, so it makes sense to hire people who know how to do that well.
But to them I say, at least we can vote where we want to whittle our lives away, right? Choose the people and products we work with and on.
You're free to work at "do your work" Coinbase if you want. Or "everyone is now a vegan" WeWork.
You can choose to build spy tech, ad pipes, weapons systems. It's all up to you.
People complaining about culture (or defending it) might be making different choices than you.
Some people just want to go to work and do their job.
Even improving morale has an ulterior motive- to boost productivity for profit. It is fine as corporations' sole purpose is to give shareholders value, but don't color it around HR bs to fool people. As least most companies are this way, the exceptions are few. People are not dumb once they realize they are disposable and start smelling the bs.
I think why most people complain about management is due to their false sense of leadership and character, pretending to be virtuous, while stabbing workers in the back (i.e. hypocrisy). There are not many good managers or employers- most lack real leadership or morals
If by "culture" you mean, a group of people with the same attitudes and goals- there is no denying that humans work better in groups. Just keep the "do-good" BS out please...unless you really meant it by embodying those ideals- living as example.
There is a difference between everyone being cold and taking it to such an extreme, everyone has to essentially be, ironically, the same robot in the rainbows and sunshine "work family".
>Well that gave me a good laugh.
Pulling out random numbers (goes for grandparent and your comment) doesn't help. Many people work in 1:5 manager:dev overhead, often more, due to multiple management layers all applying pressure on the bottom level. Not everyone is mentally a child that still needs to be babysat while an adult. Heck, college, university and all that are exactly there to ensure one is self-sufficient to an extend you don't need to manually moderate their every move.
It is fairly ironic you're devolving into the same behavior you accuse GP of, when a much more intellectual discussion can be held.
I started a company and was always a “leave me alone to do it my way” individual contributed, and it took a huge amount of effort on my part to remove that bias of how I like to work, so I could effectively manage people who don’t work best that way.
Culture by the way, is just a common ground tying people together to make everything a little less transactional. I have some transactional people and I tend to be that way myself, but most of our team enjoys shared memories, values, etc. they are the ice breaker between most people that otherwise wouldn’t have the desire or reason to hang out, but are forced to by work. Most people actually recognize this as a tool and happily play the game.
Many years ago I experienced a company lose an authentically good culture, and turn into an average shitty one in less than a year. I have to disagree.
Just because the average shitty ones still talk about culture and pretend they have it, doesn't mean a good culture isn't important.
I've also worked at companies where the company created a culture with artificial team building tricks, and without exception it led to a shitty environment where HR and political schemers screwed over both the company and their fellow employees for petty gain.
I run process oriented companies
Would I add a beer keg-refrigerator aka "kegerator" to keep some 25 year olds from considering other companies for 3 months longer than they would anyway? sure
Would I allow the work place to be used as a surrogate for their social causes? no - actually maybe if it needed to court advertisers all the time, but otherwise no because that was not the point of the business entity.
Would I hire an operations person to plan social things for employees to look forward to because I don't care about that at all? maaaaaaaaaybe
I never needed that stuff, clock in, clock out, nobody is really on the clock just meet your goals
For me, location is more important. What can you do in walking distance after work? I tend to keep my social circles separate, I don't want my colleagues or employees around.
The jobs I loathed the most had car-only commutes to office parks.
The jobs I enjoyed the most were in trendy parts of towns.
I think the people that attracts are heavily correlated and makes the culture on its own.
Same here. In a way, location can be thought of to be one of the most concrete parts of office culture. In NYC, where I've spent a lot of my work life, it's amazing how much of a proxy office location was for founder style. For some founders, a chic location wasn't prioritized or seen as ROI positive. For others, it was the exact opposite.
All I can say is that for the former category, the value-add generally far outweighed the outlay for a very crucial and formative period of its life. At a certain size, logistical concerns like price per square foot and available commercial inventory become a lot more pressing concerns.
This has extra benefits too. You don't want to turn the office into a bar for quite obvious reasons, but having it in the office makes it convenient. A lot of senior will skip off-site events because they have a family to go back to. But one beer and leave? Sure.
Why speak in absolutes when it absolutely is not conveying a shared message.
Exactly. Companies that have terrible culture project the need for a good one to get out in front of the accusation that their leadership failed in actually establishing a good one.
When people say “culture” they usually mean...
- My company treats developers like rockstars; everyone else minus executives is treated like shit. “Ninjas & unicorns!”
- My company doesn’t have HR or need it. “Who needs HR? It’s only for women, losers and SJWs.”
- My company doesn’t have security and risk processes for handling user data or anything else. “Everybody’s root!!!”
- My company has cool perks like a game room, free beer, no vacation limits and a chef on staff; but everyone is underpaid compared to market. “I know they pay me 85k to be a senior dev but at least I got beer!”
It was a place where people were made to feel welcome, got listened to, were trusted, cared about and helped each other, were free to be themselves, could freely and honestly express their opinions to execs without repercussions etc.
People were given chances to grow into new roles, and their knowledge from the previous ones was valued (no roles were looked down on). It had the right amount of management (not too much, not too little), and they took good management seriously as something to empower people rather than control them.
A lot of it was built from the ground up rather than imposed from above, and there was not a lot of money thrown at it.
All that can be destroyed much faster than it can be built.
- People are comfortable giving and receiving feedback
- Expectations and priorities are open and honest
- Work/life balance is seriously respected
- Managers serve their reports, not the other way around
Absolutely agreed. Look at how effective Valve has been with a non-hierarchical culture!
Alyx, once it gained steam, ended up turning into a hierarchical project and the largest in the company history, and was the only way Source 2 ever got finished (since they now had people waiting on it to get the game working). And it worked, as we finally now have proof that VR is a great way to tell stories. The book is excellent, and goes on sale often on Steam.
(A decent summary of the book is here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...)
They are also extremely selective when it comes to hiring (they are fairly small but get applicants from literally all over). So that some approach worked for Valve won't necessary work for RandomCo Inc where software is viewed as a cost center, simply because they can't attract the same caliber of talent.
The Alyx story you link is probably a great example of the greatest strength being diversity: where diversity often means breaking your own rules when appropriate.
Even the Roman Republic's Senate reserved the power to appoint an omnipotent dictator in times of need.
I know Github had kind of similar culture in the beginning, with flat hierarchy, but that changed at some point. Then there's Zappos which is famous for their holacratic approach, but earlier this year I've read some articles saying that internally they move away from that model.
I've listened to some of the design commentaries for the game, and I was really impressed at how much time, effort and user testing Valve was willing to put in to every detail. VR is a new medium, and it's impressive to see an organization learn how to take advantage of it so thoroughly. It takes a special culture to make space for people to try things and indulge in perfectionism—takes a lot of money too, of course, but other AAA studios have just as much but don't hew to the same standard.
I know Valve's approach is controversial and I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's clearly doing something right that very few other companies are. I've seen small teams work in ways like that, but never at scale. One of these days I'd love to work at a company trying something like that. (Probably not in video game development though :P.)
To the SV startups I have interacted with (both myself and through friends) culture can be used as the excuse to hire “people like us”.
It is also interesting how culture changes from 6 people startup to 600 people mid-sized company. Culture is best when its pull rather than push; when a large company imposes culture on you, it is natural to feel that its foreign and you're forced to adopt it. Compare this with a small group of people that you truly enjoy being with, solving problems, expressing frustrations and listening to their woes - you can create a microculture of your own which I only see as a positive thing. I do think that its better in a physically close setting like an office-space than being completely remote.
What results? Sure, making money is the final result we want to measure, but how do you determine how much each person contributes to the bottom line?
So we need to set objectives so we can measure results, then we need some way to measure results, some way to compare results across different objectives, some way to evaluate if our objectives and measures are working....
And suddenly you have management and 'culture'
I don't understand people who say we just need to 'focus on results'.... that is even more useless as saying "we just need to focus on making money"
We all know the end result we want (making money), but the hard part is figuring out how.
Take the example of a basketball team, where at least the objectives and measurement technique is well known... you have to score more points than the opponent. Even then, putting together a team is not simple. Which combination of players will produce the best outcome? Which players are good but on bad teams? What strategy should the team employ?
Your concept of work being a series of contractual outsourcing arrangements already IS how our economy works. The issue is that most things we create can't be made by one person, so the contract to make something is subcontracted out to many people who sign contracts with the one main contractor... and suddenly you have a company.
The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete.
When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation.
Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)
You can either let it grow organically or try to guide it at least a bit. And there is a reason we study for intellectual endeavors and train for physical ones.
To me, culture is the individual accountability and focus on results that you describe, plus humility, freedom to take initiative, mentorship, empathy, perseverance, personal growth, conflict resolution... and this absolutely is defined by the people you choose to work with and behavior of the leadership.
I used to be in your camp and think culture was a ridiculous thing to focus on, now I'm in the camp where I believe it's the most important part of successful teams.