What kind of culture do you expect for a subject matter that is heavily tied to Google-style whiteboard algorithm trivia / Wall Street brainteasers as ways in which freshly minted Ivy brogrammer grads are made to feel more valuable or important than people with diverse perspectives & years of actual experience.
The social behavior of Stack Overflow is just an extension of tech culture. You can change message board formats, add community guidelines, add moderators, etc., not going to change anything until the capricious (& often socially harmful) cultures of tech are forced to change through significant legal accountability and through candidates simply saying “no” to touted jobs to punish the malignant culture.
If the decor puts one off, I suspect the culture will, too. If we change it to attract some specific group, we should be careful that we are not attracting people who will not be happy here.
"CS is mature field and as such will do better if it projects a professional, neutral image" is a hypothesis, nothing more. Prove it with a successful venture -- but I don't think you will. This is still a place where passion trumps professionalism, and an enforced culturally neutral environment isn't the best incubator for passion.
Personally, I think we'll do best by simply being ourselves. And letting the demographic chips fall where they may.
As a low level employee it's not really your responsibility to try and change the culture. It's your job to find a place with a culture that fits you.
Fact is, changing a corporations culture is almost impossible. It's set over time by the people who work their and their policies. The people you hire, then hire more people, and so on indefinitely.
Google is pretty much stuck with this culture for the foreseeable future. The only thing that can change are policies. Which sure, these employees may be able to change. However, the culture that puts these policies in place will likely persist.
Consider a company where social inclusion is important. That'd be a terrible culture fit for me. When debating a technical choice, I'll say "do we all agree to run X experiment, outcome Y => choice A, outcome Z => choice B? Then we can all STFU and stop arguing." In the happy/social/fun environment, this is terrible. The promoters of B might feel unhappy, harming team cohesion, and that could be more important than 10% lower latency.
On the flip side, consider the confrontational "put up or shut up" environment I tend to prefer (and create). In this environment, "you suck at SQL" is just a factual statement that you can choose to remedy or not. Some folks really don't like being told "experiment failed, your idea is wrong, be smarter next time". Even if they are technically competent, they need a form of social interaction at work that they don't get.
There are a variety of cultural dimensions like this that matter. Another is implicit vs explicit - whether you can navigate implicit job responsibilities or they need to be spelled out. Much as we'd like to act like we are just machines taking money as input and code as outputs, this stuff does matter.
tl;dr they turned "How to Win Friends and Influence People" into a company culture.
A book that was written in 1936.
I feel like this is the equivalent of a 17 year old going nuts for Ayn Rand.
The reality is every _employee_ is different, and the culture should embrace that. Instead of trying to reshape how a person is wired, why not shape how your company's goals are defined and let people use whatever means necessary to get there?
Take a developer with an extremely low social drive who needs cold, hard facts to get on board with an initiative. Buffer's culture would completely conflict with how they're wired because it relies heavily on face-to-face interaction and all the "soft talk" would likely be perceived as manipulative by them. On the other hand, a highly socially-driven person like a sales rep would _need_ said encouragement to thrive.
That's my point; there's no one culture that fits everyone, so focus on the higher-level goals and missions of the company than the attitudes of the people.
Use your interviewing prowess to identify team fit instead of hiring based on skills and shoehorn them into the culture.
All this culture is doing is homogenizing a workforce. Debate isn't a bad thing.
It goes to what kind of company and site you want to have. If all you have is 20-something tech bros then that's the kind of company and site you will have.
If you want to appeal beyond that, you may want to broaden your culture.
Sometimes the founding cultural DNA is too strong, or attempts to change the culture fall short for a variety of reasons.
Let's say a couple of guys start a company to make it easy for people to send money back and forth to each other over email. They, like all startups, are desperate for talent so they recruit like mad. But it's important to them not only to get folks with engineering chops, but that they get folks who will fit in with their culture. In fact, one time they reject someone because he said that he liked to play hoops and they thought that was a funny way to say basketball.[1]
Fast forward to another tech boom. We've got another company, vaguely similar to the first, but this time they want to make it easier for websites to accept credit card based payments. They also recruit like mad and care a lot about culture. In fact they have something called a Sunday Test: "if this person were alone in the office on a Sunday would that make you more likely to come in and want to work with them?" It's a bit less clear what that means in this case, but it certainly sounds like they are optimizing for homogeneity.[2]
Those two stories are both about culture. They're both about companies working hard to define their own internal culture in a way that they think will make them more successful. Further I think that, in many ways, that they are right about this guess! Monocultures are very very useful in small early stage startups!
But aren't the effects of this kind of fucked up? Shouldn't we at least acknowledge the fact that not making a job offer to a guy because he used the word "hoops" is a little weird? And this doesn't even get into related issues of race or gender or class backgrounds.
Much of Shanley's post is about this sort of thing. She's not saying that meetings are great, or flat hierarchies are bad or that free lunches are bullshit. But she is saying that these things aren't 100% good. They come with some significant downsides that are rarely acknowledge inside of the "everything we do is awesome" startup bubble.
I don't think she is imputing ill will (well mostly, she is a bit). Rather she's just trying to throw some water in the face of a very self satisfied startup culture. She's saying "look around you guys! Some of these values that you think are 100% awesome have some big downsides!" And I think that is very laudable.
Apparently some of her rhetoric was a bit off the mark as some people are dismissing her post as bitter. That's too bad, because I think that she brings up some very real and very important issues.
The cultures of companies change as they grow and as outside cultures change. Especially one closely connected to internet culture, which is way more uncivil and uncompromising against dissenting opinions.
The title is a little self congratulatory and might confuse cause and effect.
IMO many of the things listed are just side effects of this type of culture and the culture is 99% decided by the existing culture at founding time and hiring processes.
You can’t have a demo day without hiring intellectually curious people who like to share. You can’t pay a flat mid-tier salary with options that punish all late arrivers without just refusing to hire people that value their labor higher.
I’ve seen this mistake made at many companies. The critical piece is your hiring, retention, and performance management.
The rest of the stuff around meeting styles, knowledge exchanges, etc is all an emergent property of the team.
Engineering culture cannot be engineered. You can cultivate it by pruning out the personalities you don’t like and figuring out how to select for the ones you do like, but that’s about it. Changing the culture otherwise is pushing a boulder uphill.
I wouldn't call any of that culture[1], the candidate doesn't believe in the same best practices or style of development as the team. It is much easier to write and understand[2].
1) [not directed at tptacek but a comment in general] I really, really detest all this use of the word culture when it is nothing more than clique behavior from high school wrapped in some passive aggressive defense. We get it, you want ego boosting over getting stuff done and won't hire old folks (35+) or people different from you. You care more about drinking buddies than actual friggin finishing and going home to real friends and family to recharge. Real culture is enriching and amazing in its diversity. You are calling a Yugo your Ferrari.
It's hard to take this seriously with so little time dedicated to evaluating culture, especially from a highly political company like Google which is famous for being a ball pit for gifted children at this point. If motivation matters (as suggested by the emphasis on task variety} then it matters if the path of least resistance is to yes-man our most noisey peers. Going deeper, cultural hostility explains manager-employee relationships and inter-employee relationships to a certain degree and even if it can't explain th perfectly it can predict them comfortably.
What's more, you can't get a good sense of culture impact through employee surveys like this paper is trying to do because that implies you already understand the culture in the surveyed regions/companies which does not seem to have transpired here. Evaluating the effect of perks, time obligations, etc. in isolation only serves to perpetuate whichever culture was already dominant while simultaneously failing to ask any interesting questions about why that observation is dominant. You could publish 200 papers like this one and yet without geography-centric comparisons to places like Latin America, Europe, and SEA or cross-political comparisons such as differences between American Blue and Red employees, all you're evaluating is what the dominant group in these orgs prefers.
I have no doubt this comment will be buried with downvotes and minimal replies though, because the biggest lie of all that I see perpetuated here is that software development is our can be politically neutral (easily disproven by looking into who can speak to what topics in a public company vs. a company with ties to given like the many contractors). The reason I'm saying it though is that at some point, probably after we've retired, there will be devs who aren't so drowned in money that it makes more sense for companies to pander to our prejudice and when that time comes the forerunners (from every leaning because these things are often company specific) will be in for a rude awakening as they see their work seething as the foundation for producing machinations they deem nightmarish.
Unfortunately its the kind of culture most companies seem to get. The few that don't have that culture, like early Facebook or google, can skyrocket from getting actual talent, but even those companies start to devolve into the scripts once they get large enough unless there is a concerted effort to avoid it.
People are animals and animals are lazy so the path of least effort gets chosen the majority of the time, and that means going off of predetermined scripts.
Yikes. Culture starts from the person at the top and flows down.
Curious to see how and if the cultural narrative within Silicon Valley companies will change one year from now after all that's happened. Will there actually be meaningful change? I don't know, but I'm hoping so.
Like everything in programming, the cultural part is more difficult than the technical part. I've seen more than one a fellow coworker comment all my tests. If you don't create the correct culture, and there isn't management buy in, it won't work.
It's almost impossible to have a company with the scale of Google to have good culture. Good perks and you get spoilt in that aspect for sure, but I doubt culture is an important aspect of any company's hiring practice once you get to Google's scale and needing to hire as many people as possible to grow. Where there's diversity, there's also diverse opinions and political leanings and personalities, which leads to conflict, misunderstanding, people trying to one-up the other, and it all leads to a toxic culture (unless you're the ones coming out on top). But hey, there's always therapy (aka the internal groups) to help you along.
Cultures dies as a company grows to a certain size. Feels like the best way to combat that would be to have teams that are small within the company and operate independently and with autonomy, especially when it comes to hiring. That probably isn't realistic though within a large company. Am keen on what ideas people have or if they've had experience with something that works with regards to retaining a good culture.
Maybe controversially, I'm going to suggest that this kind of diversity culture and brogrammer culture are both manifestations of the same misguided mindset - one where people try to engineer a culture from scratch, but end up creating something that only works for the kinds of people they're personally comfortable with.
The comments about more formal workspaces are interesting. Adult-oriented workspaces may be more bland and superficially less creative, but a space where you can be left alone to get on with your work and where "culture" isn't being forced on employees seems like it could be more likely to give everyone freedom to simply be professional.
The social behavior of Stack Overflow is just an extension of tech culture. You can change message board formats, add community guidelines, add moderators, etc., not going to change anything until the capricious (& often socially harmful) cultures of tech are forced to change through significant legal accountability and through candidates simply saying “no” to touted jobs to punish the malignant culture.
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