Comment by benjaminjosephw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjaminjosephw | Hacker News Reader

benjaminjosephw

> the kind of conditions that create good information flow tend to be those that favour cooperation, creativity, and safety. On the other side, conditions that interfere with information flow also tend to decrease creativity, create conflict, and make the organisation involved less safe.

Although management and leadership do play an extremely important role in shaping culture, I wonder whether the kinds of tools and technology an organisation uses can also have a significant impact.

My guess is that creating transparent data sharing capabilities within an organisation would undermine the political point scoring that some people achieve with information hording/hiding. Being able to comment on data and processes from any part of an organisation would also encourage a culture of empowerment and orient individuals and teams towards the mission of the organisation rather than each individual unit. Technology could achieve this kind of impact if it were broadly adopted across the organisation.

What role do tools like Slack, Salesforce and Airtable have in shaping the culture of an organisation?

Some organisations partaking in software development, to this day, do not have ANY kind of source control repository. If you want to be horrified by (lack of) a technology impacting organisational culture, spend some time in one of those places where there is no vocabulary, no interest, and even no concept of more than one person seeing a given project's code.

Personally, I think they do have a role; having worked at companies where code review was informal and managed via email/chat, and companies where code review occurs more openly via pull/merge requests and conversations transparent to all engineers, the tooling makes a big difference.

I'd also go further and say that the way the tools and the workflows within them are designed ends up having an influence on the organizations that use them (and of course, there's a feedback loop there as the organizations request changes/features).

This means there ends up being a real culture battle for transparency and accountability at the infrastructure and tooling level. Some people participating might not even consider the implications, but there are certainly vested interests who would prefer more closed/controlled environments, and competing interests who prefer more open and transparent environments which lend themselves to the kind of local fix / global fix / inquiry end of the spectrum mentioned in the article.

In my profesdional experience, zero; in terms of changing the power structure of an organisation.

Same. Any tool/infra that threatens the culture/statu-quo from the power structure will be, at best, impactless, at worst, will trigger a real internal war that will resolve with layoffs (been there - it ended bad for everyone).

It _has to_ come from the group culture, which is empowered by the good will of the power structure, that comes from the top (investors, board, executive managers).

If it's not there, it will never be, change lanes.

Edit to add:

And if it _is_ there, it might go, because it's a fragile equilibrium (any change of course in the management/board can be a red flag).

I have seen much change coming from tools that instead of requiring a different way to do things, just allows both, but makes the different one more productive while not impacting the previous one.

Of course, the tools must have some political support. But they do enable status-quo changes.

There's some research in the "Accelerate" book that talks about this. For example, having an automated CI/CD pipeline decreases stress measures (iirc).

I fail to see this in practice in any of the orgs i have worked. The bigger the orgs, more the number of these tools are involved, and still higher information hording/hiding.

Tools/tech just won't fix people issue.

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