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"!
The irony of writing this comment for a post that made the front page of one of the most widely read aggregators in tech, in said comment section
No, but the CEO will absolutely seek out my recommendations and I do read random blog posts
Indeed, but the CEO is Queen Promethium, and you are just one of the people she's transformed into a bolt to go into her infernal machine.
I remember many years ago companies used to advertise their "joel score" (not quite the same thing but related) to attract employees.
This is something which I think investors could also use as an indicator of company quality.
A lot of cultural problems also have quite easy fixes they just require shining a light on specific abuses of executive power which simultaneously hurt employees and destroys shareholder value. There is a lot more of this than I think people realize.
>A lot of cultural problems also have quite easy fixes they just require shining a light on specific abuses of executive power which simultaneously hurt employees and destroys shareholder value. There is a lot more of this than I think people realize.
What do you mean? Who would "shine this light", on which executive, and who would they whistle-blow to exactly, the board? Short of embezzlement or sexual harassment (and not even all sexual harassment cases) I can't think of any cases where calling out an executive's behavior won't result in immediate retaliation. This is a genuinely tricky problem, but most of all I get the sense executives would rather own the wrong decision than have a subordinate get credit for swaying them to the right decision.
As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
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!)
What might be more pointed, instead of pointing to the "useful effects of good culture" why not have actual tactics on how to reform or remove bad management and preserve and expand good management?
But I don't think my comment is as hopeless as all that. There are places with better culture; all other things being equal, they should be out-performing places with bad culture. That means that they should be more likely to hire, and more likely to pay better. So, if you're in a place with bad culture, don't just sit there. Go looking.
* announce that effective immediately, the company will begin its transformation to an "AI-first" organization, with AI driving most development workflows by end of year
* percolate the message through upper management down to line managers that they are to assure their reports that the aim of the transformation is to augment current employees, not reduce headcount
* stealthily start lopping off heads anyway
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.