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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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>
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.
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?
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"!
No, but the CEO will absolutely seek out my recommendations and I do read random blog posts
I do believe the opposite is true too. If you have a strong culture, a product or idea with promise, and a team of smart and capable people, it can move you faster in the right direction too.
The problem is that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2.
Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture.
Now what?
As for your "now what", companies with a bad culture will be at a competitive disadvantage. Their efforts to wring more productivity out of their broken culture usually make the culture worse. My advice would be to leave ships once you realize that they're sinking. (That doesn't make you a rat!)
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Giving junior devs or non-devs what is essentially automated stackoverflow copypasta on steroids only amplified all the downsides of inexperience that we already learned well over a decade ago.
Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. An inexperienced person delegating what they don't understand to AI produces more bugs, not less.
Those mindlessly copying from stackoverflow were in a similar situation, but only because they ignored or didn't understand the warnings from the discussion. You're rolling the dice if you expect AI to explain itself, as it can only ever know at most what it scraped from (stackoverflow and poorly documented github repos).
As it was not too long ago, searching on stackoverflow was already a hail mary play. AI just makes the problem worse. At best, with AI there's a lot of reinventing the wheel with no hope of ever doing better than merely approximating the wheel.
Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.
To me it is obvious that an org with a good culture will be more able to identify and reach its targets than a dysfunctional org lacking trust and safety.