One Question You Should Ask About Every New Job

1. Is it a fair/just company? (Will I get promotions and raises for working hard?)

2. Is it safe? (Will I get fired for trying and failing at a task?)

3. Is it a place that provides autonomy? (Can I shape my own destiny here? Will I have influence?)

"When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although finding the right title, position and salary is important, there’s another consideration that matters just as much: culture. The culture of a workplace — an organization’s values, norms and practices — has a huge impact on our happiness and success."

This is the framing statement of the article. I would like to dispute that there is a way to separate titles, positions, salaries, and "culture". The "culture" of many places is to offer "open plan seating", sweatshirts, jargon, memes, snacks, soda, gym membership, happy hours, a poor salary relative to the skills demanded, and work the employees to the bone until they're burnt out. Stated differently: an organization's actual values (above all, profit seeking) are usually not the same as its stated values and non sequitor doodads. Typically, I hear people discussing "how special/strong the culture is here" in a cultlike way which sounds much like Stockholm syndrome to me. Sillicon Valley types are exceedingly prone to this kind of outward self-deception.

"“Organizational cultures, and in particular stories, carry a claim to uniqueness — that an institution is unlike any other,” the researchers wrote. But paradoxically, the same stories occur “in virtually identical form, in a wide variety of organizations.”"

Uh huh. That's because the whole story of "corporate culture" does little to break up the humdrum fact that work needs to get done correctly, which means that it tends to be performed in a broadly similar fashion across an industry. The culture of working at a corporation as the primary mode of life is the corporate culture, and all instances of it will be chained to that fact, even if the details are different.

"The M.I.T. professor Edgar H. Schein observes that the most visible parts of an organization’s culture are the artifacts and practices — how people talk, look and act. There are lots of organizations where people laugh at unique jokes, speak in unusual jargon, decorate their office spaces in unconventional ways, or have funky rules and norms. But the more defining parts of a culture are its values. Values are the principles people say are important and, more crucially, the principles people show are important through their actions."

The primary value of the corporation is profit-seeking, and there are many secondary values (customer service, quality assurance) that are directly related to this primary value. There is sometimes room for tertiary/aesthetic values to be more prominent in the minds and lives of the employees than the primary values; in these situations, we can say that there is a defined corporate culture. While a corporate culture may or may not evolve organically, its purpose is clear: vastly and cheaply increase employee productivity and retention.

In this sense, the article has a point: it's better to work for a company that has a corporate culture because such arrangements tend to increase your satisfaction as an employee. But, as always, be cynical: when taken to its logical conclusion, the objective of a corporate culture is to keep you on board and working hard even if circumstances would cause you to leave. Whether organic or intentionally formed, a corporate culture serves the owners more than it serves you.