What defines a great company culture?

This kind of comment is underrated. A lot of advice is really survivorship bias descriptions!

Relatively useful:

“All you need is access to capital, or a lot of stuff that can only be done with capital, and that’s what you’re missing, girl.”

Not useful at all:

“What you really need is this cargo-cult aspect that the successful companies have years after their success, but also tons of failed companies have that we never consider, and it isn’t the main reason for the company’s success”

A company culture is great if it fits the company strategy. In other words, the company should value internally what the customers like about the company. It might high quality or agility or efficiency or whatever.

If a company changes its strategy, the culture can be too strong. You can see that a lot where established hardware companies struggle to adopt more of a software culture. A culture can be too weak to support the company strategy in any meaningful way. That is a competitive disadvantage because there is a lot more need for communication and coordination.

Agreed!

Microsoft is a great example of a company which had...

a) many cultural shifts over time

b) still is a company with many different sub team cultures

...and regardless of where they were on the spectrum they have always managed to sell Windows, Office and SQL Server very well.

Yeah, a lot of this is just retroactive justification and narrative building, which then gets cargo culted because everyone wants to repeat the success. But in fact what makes these billion dollar companies successful is the outlier confluence of product-market fit, timing, strong execution, and a million small decisions along the way that compounded returns on a few lucky breaks. I don't doubt the importance of company culture to operate effectively, but I am very skeptical of crediting the success mega corps to any particular aspect of company culture.

As the post says, "the knife cuts both ways".

You're missing the point! One can't say what are the cultural elements of "great". All you can do is tradeoff one element for another. What defines a great company culture is one that is held consistently, and that you, personally, as a person with your own particular outlook (let's call it red or blue), enjoy and are productive in. What's great for you is not what's great for another.

Too bad we can't understand this in our politics.

> Reinforcing that "whatever the cultural values might be they have to be strongly endorsed by the leadership" can be part of that, but that's describing something other than the "great culture" itself.

Necessarily so! You cannot define "great" culture because there is no such single thing. You can define consistency, though. This is the critical element because it means that you can predict the repercussions of your actions and act accordingly. Rewards and punishments don't feel capricious and subject to "politics". You don't have to guess what your particular manager will do based on his particular and inconsistent whims.

My view on what the thread is saying, is that having everyone aligned on the same page of how to work and communicate means you don’t waste time on arguing on how to work and communicate.

Instead things become frictionless and the organization can become fluid.

Reminds me of the “Bullet Holes and Abraham Wald” lesson in survivorship bias https://onebiteblog.com/finding-the-missing-bullet-holes/

> People were no longer aligned or empowered, and the incentive system was changed to basically destroy engineering culture.

Same with Google. The intentional misrepresentation and ousting of Damore was a turning point where engineering culture was run over by activist culture.

> but what they ended up changing ruined what made it great

Please explain more. Did they change more than just sexual and other harassment reporting and handling policies? Why did any of the changes have any effect on engineering?

> TK, contrary to the popular narrative, was an extremely progressive person

Travis Kalanick illegally obtained and read the private medical records of an Indian worman who was raped by her Uber driver. He publicly claimed she was lying to frivolously sue the company, despite absolutely no evidence to support those allegations.

> Uber, post-shenanigans and pre-Susan Fowler memo

The "shenanigans"--I think you mean systemic discrimination against women via a culture of sexual harassment by high-ranking men with the complicity of HR--continued until Susan Fowler published her memo and the board belatedly fired TK.

> The Susan Fowler memo was an inflection point that lead to its culture being essentially destroyed.

> I don’t discount anything Susan Fowler wrote in her memo

This reads like you're trying to blame the fall of Uber's engineering culture on Susan Fowler without saying so. And sure, there's room for people to disagree: I personally think the board fired Travis Kalanick because he didn't IPO as quickly as they wanted. But this honestly reads like "Everything at Uber was great until this one woman complained and ruined it for all of us." And I don't think that's what you actually want to communicate.

https://www.vox.com/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-a...

No. The culture seemed great at the time, because all the skeletons were still in the closet.

Alcohol was rampant. There was all sorts of sexual harassment and execs having affairs with reports. There was politics and subterfuge and extremely non-blameless postmortems (i.e. you were fired). People were working 60 hour weeks.

Hiring was a total shit show. There was no standard practice -- managers were hiring their friends left and right. Nepotism, not meritocracy, ruled. Recruiters blatantly lied to candidates about offers. There were a few suicides.

People were spying on their ex's, celebrities, fighting and committing fraud, giving friends credits or discounts. Thousands upon thousands of borked fares where drivers or riders were respectively paid or charged incorrectly.

From a technical standpoint, it couldn't be worse. Sure it was fast and exciting, but some of the worst, biggest technical debt decisions ever were made in this time. Almost all of the engineers who made this decisions are no longer there. China, schemaless, M3, all the ops shenanigans. On call was a nightmare. Teams were competing internally by solving the same problem but not talking to each other.

You wanna know why the culture seemed great? Because they were burning money like there is tomorrow. There was no oversight. So the firehouse got turned off, the party was over.

Fowler was a symptom. Her memo didn't cause culture to implode, it was already a time bomb.

> Many in the agile or “new work” camp seem to believe that their way is the ONLY way, for example.

I think many in the Agile camp are fed up with being held back by people who are unwilling to change, and are willing to break the mold (and some eggs) in order to find a new, better way to work.

> Consistency is much more important than how the culture actually is.

This just leads to a consistently toxic culture that nobody wants to work for. I have worked for plenty of places where nobody gives a shit and nobody tries to change anything, and it was terrible. Our working life should mean more than a stock ticker.

I think consistency is overrated, and a cause of countless undue issues.

We seem to mostly agree that diversity is important, and having employees from different background help bring different ideas and solutions to the table, react with more agility on unforeseen situations.

On a fundamental level, applying the same vision and forcing the same values and rituals on everyone looks to me at odds with what diversity is supposed to bring.

As an aside, if a company has a credit card processing division and mini-game producing divisions, I'd see a clear case for them to not have the same values nor the same priorities, and in the end the same culture. That's what I also felt reading accounts from UX designers at Google in the early days, when they seemed to be crushed by the 100% data driven culture from which they tried to carve a small niche.

Came here to say the same thing. Neither company represents cultures or values that enrich the communities they are a part of.

At very least they are large enough to exhibit most scenarios, good and bad.

If you take IBM as an example, on the one hand you have the IBM people like to make fun of but then you also have teams inside IBM who are extremely sharp (e.g. the people working on their Silicon). That being said culture isn't technology.

Not having to think about work 24/7 is culture. You need to look for a job where that is part of the culture.

Take a typical 9-5 job. Problem solved.

Agreed. I'm not sure what this "culture" talk is. I've been in the bay area for a decade now and have worked at a small YC startup with a modest exit, a big-ish company that got acquired, and a bigger company that's gone public.

In all cases each company talks up it's "culture" - to me it's just a phrase that elicits an eye-roll.

Another commenter suggested you look for a "typical 9-to-5", but even there I'm sure they'd talk up their amazing culture.

Agree. Professionalism is what I look for in a company, not culture.

You just described a culture.

That in itself is a perfectly valid culture - e.g. happy and relaxed employees who actually want to come into work in the morning are probably more useful than even extremely clever people bored out of their minds being berated by egotistical managers.

> How about none at all?

This is like saying I don't want to have any behavior.

Every company has a culture. The difference is whether you are aware of it and working on it or not.

A good company culture is one that the whole company follows. As opposed to a bad company culture, where there is basically no global culture to speak of, and every manager has their own little fiefdoms.

The message is that consistency matters and that strong leadership can produce good results in the right circumstances. Top-down isn't necessarily a bad thing.

And what are the alternatives? No consistency throughout the company would mean that there wouldn't be any company culture to speak of. And if your processes aren't (ultimately) top-down, then what's the company leadership actually for?

Yeah, it certainly doesn't define what great company culture actually is.

Though I’m an atheist, I think that many different churches do good things for their participants from a community and social perspective, even though they may differ from each other significantly in their specific religious doctrine.

The way I understand this is: consistency is important for managing expectations.

Change is not a problem but consistent application of expectations is important (in my opinion, this would include expectations around how you manage change).

If you have one set of expectations from one manager, and a different set of expectations from another manager, the complexity of your work just squared.

The major takeaway for me is that with a strongly held culture, everyone in the company is playing the game by the same rules, making it clear how to succeed, how to fail, and as such, how to conduct business. It's also clear whether or not you would enjoy working there -- there's no finding the right team or department with its own culture if everyone has the same culture there.

Of course, he doesn't explore whether or not the benefits of this are worth the disadvantages, and there's plenty of room for argument either way, especially with large organizations.

Yeah, it seems to me the same. I dont see that as massive positive.

>> I find this thread kind of confusing, it basically seems to say the culture itself doesn't matter. What matters is that it is strongly held. Which means top down, ritualized and vigorously defended against any attempts at change.

Yes, because you're taking a significant risk joining any company (in the sense that you have limited time and want to go where you can have the most impact for the firm and best outcomes for your goals).

You often dont know details about projects, people, etc -- but if you vibe with the culture, you can easily find your place there. If the culture is all over the place, it is hard to know from the outside. And if the culture is a mismatch for you, better to neither waste your time nor that of the firm. Without a strongly projected culture, that is hard to do.

> I find this thread kind of confusing

Having it split into tweets doesn’t help. I struggle to think of a worse format - perhaps a series of short videos would be worse?

> Second, management never knows how to solve a problem better, they just pick one and go with it

But if your (presumably intelligent, qualified) engineers are at a stalemate between two things, what's to say both options aren't fine and they need just exactly that: someone more senior to pick one, given the pros and cons of each.

But what you are allowed to do needs to be limited. That photocopier might be in a bad spot, but that is the only place where we have have enough power to run it. Marketing needs X, but they are by Y instead because I want them to be forced to interact with Y (at least when getting coffee), a team they would otherwise ignore to our eventual failure. Or worse the person I caught trying to use GPL-3 code in our proprietary code base.

Agency is good, but only if people understand where they have agency and make changes in those areas and leave the others to someone else.

A big one for me these days is "No pressure to attend non-mandatory outside-of-work-hours outings like after work happy hours".

I don't really drink, I don't like bars, I often like to spend my evenings with my SO or my friends, not my coworkers. I don't like being made to feel like I am "not a team player" for not wanting to participate in "team building" outside of work hours.

Gossip is useful, though, because social networks around work usually outpace org chart changes by (ballpark guess) 10x.

Well I've seen culture change in a day. If you have enough power and can unilaterally change an incentive structure you can get people to fall in line really quickly.

When I worked at a bank we had pretty predatory selling practices and a fitting culture. This was starting to catch the eye of the media and government so the Bank exec stepped in and said the parties over and If anyone doesn't conform to these new rules then they're out on the street. That day, the culture changed, and everyone was happy to changed because they didn't want the existential consequences to happen to them.

There's the softly softly approach over years and then there's the speeding u-turn. Both can work. The latter just takes more grit.

It is an important part of the job of the CEO to say what the values of the company should be, and make sure that the company tends towards following those values. The culture then follows by that. It is allowed but insufficient for the ceo to declare that the company is to be more open or collaborative—they must also make sure that management below them are deciding things (eg distribution of work to teams, how performance is assessed) in ways which promote those values. And sometimes values do need to change quickly to change the focus of a business. Maybe VC money runs out and profitability becomes more important than growth. Setting values can distribute the work of changing a business across all its staff.

Its a bit of a chicken/egg situation. The right people to hire are the people that meets your requirements. Some of the requirements would be what their cultural beliefs and behaviours. So the cultured is enforced by enforcing the right type of people you hire. It is a vicious circle.

Sort of. However you need to be careful about unexpected consequences.

The vast majority of programmers are male, so if you only hire the best you might go a long time without hiring any females, thus developing a male-only culture. I've been told the worst case of this is one female the rest males, as the one female encourages that bad parts of male only culture to ensure that she is always the most powerful female in the room (because she is the only one). None of this needs to be true, but when you only have 3 males total you need to ensure that you are not developing female hostile culture by accident. Once you have a few females around they can moderate the male only culture, but going from 1 to a few is hard because the great females you want to hire will check your culture and not even apply thus locking you out of that market.

I used females, but there are plenty of other minorities. If the subject was nurses you would reverse the minorities, some of their cultures are male hostile.

I once worked at a place with a strong, great culture. They acquired another place with a strong, great culture. The cultures were diametrically opposed. It turned into an awful culture for both.

People find like-cultured people. Don't hire someone who is a mob programming advocate into a culture that thrives on individual work, or vice versa. Don't hire someone who wants a completely transparent culture into Amazon.

Interesting, and thanks for the framework. As someone who leans heavily toward the right side of your framework, it's good to have a reminder there are "left-sided" companies that are successful.

It seems to me managers may prefer the right side, while many employees see the left as optimal. Did your data shed any light on this?

Maybe it's because you refer to yourself as an advanced programmer?

Right. Say anything in an interview to suggest you won't work 60 hour weeks every week and you're suddenly not a good culture fit.

Workaholism is a real problem in North America I guess

IMO that's a feature, not a bug. I really would not fit into that culture, so I'd love for them to reject me based on my refusal to work overtime, except in emergencies... Which had better be pretty seldom.

I don't understand this.

We know Zuckerburg is a secret privacy fanatic. The signal app on his phone, buying up all property that can see into his enclave, the tape over his webcam. When he launched he thought people who shared everything with him were “dumbfucks.” In other words, he wouldn’t have shared the type of information that others were giving away for free - as a college student.

That's not my experience. In fact it's the opposite. I suspect that incorporating values can work, but it's not universal.

Best company cultures usually concentrate on good work, not values. Results to the society don't matter when people get things done.

I think most companies should try to be as amoral as possible outside the purpose of the company. People choose to work in different companies based on their values or other needs.

Are you planning to name this person? You should, to help protect others.

I remember early FB employees talking to me about how they were spying on people's private activity (who was looking at who's page for instance). I have no doubt there were and are many unethical things going on there. It is indeed a joke to suggest they have a "good" culture.

I read all of it against my better judgement and I still have no idea what you're really talking about. There was no substance, just vague allusions. But anyone can make those. I could tell you Zuck is a lizard person and make odd hand gestures as I whisper about dark secrets. So what? It comes off as being written by a crank.

I submitted this to HN - sorry if it was premature. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724522 I also tried to contact The Guardian (UK) about it today - will try again tomorrow.

Spend my evening going down the rabbit hole and trying to see what you have been up to for a few decades and seems your are pretty spot on and pretty informed on many things. But some of the things I stumble on also seems incoherent and perhaps that’s because you can fill in the blanks in your head but don’t write it or because you deliberately make it hard to decipher. If all you have said is true it’s quite impressive what you have seen over the years but I can also see that it can be hard to believe the way it’s communicated. I was wondering what happened between 2011 and now where your described this guy I think you are referring to as a great guy and I hope that if there is anything to your latest post that you would actually follow through with it and elaborate more on it.

I think the author is talking about office politics, not electoral politics.

From an employee perspective, the one fairly definitive upside I can spot is knowing what to expect ahead of time.

Are you implying it's mainly/only great for management?

Great question - it depends what (or who) you’re optimising for.

I’m generalising, but as an example:

The optimal culture to get very difficult things done far more quickly and efficiently than other companies could (think SpaceX) probably often won’t have the best work-life balance. In contrast, a culture which optimises (at least partly) for employee well-being will very likely lose some edge, efficiency, innovation, drive… along the way.

There are of course myriad other variables, but there probably isn’t an ideal answer to the culture question: it all depends on what you want to do, and how you’re willing to act to do it.

You should try to get past that to post-scarcity thinking, possibly interstellar.

The thing with salaries is, there is a certain number (different for everyone obviously) at which you are happy and comfortable, and each incremental dollar from there on matters less and less. That is the point where you can afford to care about things like social impact, company culture, fulfillment and more.

I don't think the author is drawing any connection between great company culture and great company ethics. The culture refers more to group dynamics, which values are embraced and which are ignored, the kind of leadership, etc.

In this context, great has more to do with efficacy and consistency. The author would probably say a company can have a great culture and still be very polarizing or controversial.

That would assume that all big companies are the same. Which is provably false.

Chaos is a culture, right?

You don't seem to know the difference between character and culture.