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- Hacker News
- The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful.
Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture.
Now what?
by newsomix9xl - It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture.by joshheitzman
- The biggest stock-price hack for a CEO is:
* 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
by bitwize - It always felt like AI adoption should come from the bottom up, driven by people who are actually in a position to assess whether it makes any positive impact. Granted, that only works if your culture encourages agency in the first place.by andrii
- AI accelerates dysfunction. It will help you get to the wrong place faster if you're already heading there.
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.
by aesthetics1 - I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years.
As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
by sghiassy - I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left.
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>
by zug_zug - [for companies with idk 100 or less headcount] Good culture boils down to:
1. Predictability. Flavors of it: deliver features on time, roadmap stays mostly stable, on demand requests are known about ahead of time, business struggling or doing well transparent, tech debt / upkeep are first class citizens of planned work. All of this is project management and communication.
2. Org pays market rate and has good benefits. Employment is an exchange and esp for those who work hard, they deserve the recognition.
3. “People” (aka HR) is taken seriously. The team is expected to be checked in. Those who aren’t get fired. Ideally, there’s enough in place for individuals to come to their own conclusion that they should be fired. See #1. When a req is open it’s a top priority of whoever is in charge.
You can be PM-nonexistent or PM-heavy with lots of meetings and JIRA. Maybe you can accomplish all 3 above in both worlds. My experience is that process when done right moves the needle. No process leads to nonsense and process for the sake of process grinds it to a halt. It all gets better when the leaders are bought in or self aware enough to get out of the way.
If you push for change long enough, and aren’t an asshole about it, just genuinely interested and motivated, there’s a chance you’ll see your vision for better culture materialize.
by dirtbag__dad