alt Hacker NewsI think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left.
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>
Replies
> Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism?
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.
> 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?
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?
> whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs
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"!
> But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this.
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.
Part of the value is to help the people stuck in bad cultures realize that it's the culture that's broken, not them. It's easy to lose sight of that! If you can recognize it, it's easier to do something about it whether that's changing your behavior and expectations, trying to change the culture bottom up or leaving altogether.
>> but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this
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.
Most people have only a handful of job experiences to think through how things work or should work, so articles like this help broaden one's perspective.
> Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism
No, but the CEO will absolutely seek out my recommendations and I do read random blog posts
> random blog posts
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
It might be a pipe dream but I'd like to see some sort of checklist for dev companies using hard-to-bullshit objective criteria to highlight that they either have a good culture or that their culture is toxic.
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.
> 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.
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.
Anyone who is looking for a job in the future would probably benefit from knowing what to look for (and what not to look for). I'm not likely to ever be in a position where I have outsized influence on the culture of the company I work at, but I do have the ability to influence what company I work at, and basically all of the criteria boil down to either compensation (not just salary, benefits too, since I live in a country where healthcare is a privilege rather than a right), and how happy I will be working there. As much as I hate how many companies don't treat their employees well, I also know that's not going to change any time soon, so to the extent I'm able to, I want to avoid working at companies where their culture sucks.
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.