Ask HN: How to keep good culture as you become more senior?

3 points·matthewwolfe··2 comments

When you join a company, you may really like the culture. As your tenure goes from months to years, you may find yourself becoming a representative of the company culture. How do you maintain a good company culture as you become one of the ones defining what the culture is? It seems much easier to spot a good culture than to create one.

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As the company grows a certain proportion of new engineers - by law of averages - will be self motivated to seek out and understand how things work, what makes the company tick and how people go about getting things done. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to acquire this knowledge - for they will be standard bearers in carrying the culture forward to the next generation. Record videos and documetns from greybeards and leaders on war stories, architecture, general rules for making decisions and really any other topic that is germane to how culture is defined.

Circumscribed of course as my opinion only, and what I've seen in my career.

The evidence is that scale is against you, and the profit motive is against you.

I tender as evidence: "don't be evil"

Some amount of navel-gazing is needed. The thing would be to keep it as small as possible. My own personal barrier is 45min meetings not 1-2hrs and half-day, and no workshopping the semicolon in the mission-statement. That said, I could handle once a year? and a subcommittee?

Some of this is unavoidable. Culture changes. We don't make women leave the workforce when they get married any more.

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