Corporate culture likes: access to lot of smart people, big teams, plenty to learn about large businesses, gives you perspective on many types of business functions, culture etc, you get to hear about every possible tool/software in the world
Corporate culture dislikes: too much red tape, takes forever to get something done including access to a particular software/tool, not much choice of working preference, shitty cubes (mostly), most ppl are there just to do their job and not many care about innovations or value add, too many crappy legacy software which no one wants to change. plenty more to add....
lol culture at a big co...dont bs me plz.I've worked at big co's, and theres no culture there. Only places with any sort of character are small - mid sized startups.
as for culture.. it's great in the beginning, but as the company grows to medium and large, communication begins to break down, and bureaucracy creeps in, poisoning the old culture.
with more people being brought in (usually at a rapid pace as you hit your growth spurts), you have to adapt to more personality types, and company culture&feel will suffer as a result
A company culture is great if it fits the company strategy. In other words, the company should value internally what the customers like about the company. It might high quality or agility or efficiency or whatever.
If a company changes its strategy, the culture can be too strong. You can see that a lot where established hardware companies struggle to adopt more of a software culture. A culture can be too weak to support the company strategy in any meaningful way. That is a competitive disadvantage because there is a lot more need for communication and coordination.
Based on a study by Stanford, there are 5 types of corporate cultures in tech.
1. Star: Hire the best people, give them super luxurious offices and perks, let them do what they like. Something like Fog Creek, where interns get a luxurious hotel when called in for interview and get flown in via helicopter.
2. Engineering-based: The whole org chart architecture is based on pushing engineering as far as possible. Something like Google and Facebook, where management decisions are made based on data, and marketing is done from a perspective of "if you build a good product, it will be easy to sell."
3. Bureaucratic: Culture emerges from the middle managers. Job descriptions are clear cut. Often things like pay and perks follow a rigid formula and there are regular rituals and routines.
4. Autocratic: Similar to bureaucratic, but designed around one person, usually the CEO. Work, do what the boss says, get paid. Not necessarily evil, something like Steve Jobs comes to mind.
5. Commitment: Build the company as a place where people don't want to leave. Avoid firing anyone, often offering retraining for existing staff. Lifestyle perks - generous maternity leave, work from home options, training. Basecamp is a model company.
Some are hybrids, which usually does worse than the others by mixing the worst of both worlds. E.g. if you adopt a star culture, you probably can't adopt rigid project management, and you can't do two months maternity leave.
The others are not bad. E.g. Autocratic does the worst on average. But that doesn't mean it's wrong. I probably work in an autocratic environment and it's the best job so far. There's upsides, like management being fully aware of the product, development, marketing, and users.
You can probably reverse engineer interviews to see which they fit. An org chart will clearly point out most of these.
Yours sounds like it's not a star or commitment culture. But it could well be an engineering culture, which is not bad either.
The major takeaway for me is that with a strongly held culture, everyone in the company is playing the game by the same rules, making it clear how to succeed, how to fail, and as such, how to conduct business. It's also clear whether or not you would enjoy working there -- there's no finding the right team or department with its own culture if everyone has the same culture there.
Of course, he doesn't explore whether or not the benefits of this are worth the disadvantages, and there's plenty of room for argument either way, especially with large organizations.
Not sure if these count as company culture but: Frequent hiring freezes, blown out projects that never make progress, IT support outsourced to SEA where tickets that took hours before take days instead, upper management more focused on making new acquisitions rather than integrating existing business units, and so on.
Not just an established culture but a product with a long history of success despite its jank and problems. I appreciate the enthusiasm of new hires but often they don't understand priorities or that the goal is profit and not perfection (for most of us).
Also, in a big company, culture is not homogeneous. Your direct manager and team will create their culture, with mild influence from the surrounding corporation.
I like the ability to optionally participate in a work culture, in fact, looks like you could pick and choose between a few. The forced culture of most companies is pretty tiring.
At very least they are large enough to exhibit most scenarios, good and bad.
If you take IBM as an example, on the one hand you have the IBM people like to make fun of but then you also have teams inside IBM who are extremely sharp (e.g. the people working on their Silicon). That being said culture isn't technology.
Yep, and what I've heard (and only heard, never worked there myself) is that Microsoft has some of the most programmer friendly corporate culture around.
A lot (if not most) big companies are not like that. The reason Joel's writing on company culture is so popular is because such simple things are still quite rare in the world.
Culture is overrated ? I have worked at Oracle and Google and I strongly believe the culture and values define the giant difference between how these companies operate
I like this analogy. I would say that culture is actually part of "do you like who you're working with," though. "I don't like the culture" is a way of saying "I don't like management" or "I don't like my peers."
If your immediate peers are great, but the organization doesn't support your getting training, makes you dress up, makes you keep timesheets, requires TPS reports and long meetings, etc, those decisions are being made by people. And they are being annoying (even if they're otherwise nice).
In my experience, the corporation's culture matters much less than the personalities of those you frequently interact with, whether those people are colleagues, customers, or vendors.
reply