Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
newsletter.eng-leadership.com198 points by gpi 6 hours ago
198 points by gpi 6 hours ago
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>
Anyone who is looking for a job in the future would probably benefit from knowing what to look for (and what not to look for). I'm not likely to ever be in a position where I have outsized influence on the culture of the company I work at, but I do have the ability to influence what company I work at, and basically all of the criteria boil down to either compensation (not just salary, benefits too, since I live in a country where healthcare is a privilege rather than a right), and how happy I will be working there. As much as I hate how many companies don't treat their employees well, I also know that's not going to change any time soon, so to the extent I'm able to, I want to avoid working at companies where their culture sucks.
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.
> 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?
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 think sharing such ideas openly allows people to converge on similar feelings and experience which eventually leads to people experimenting these for real. We need to take into account that a lot of people reading and writing these kind of thoughts seriously may not be CEO at present but that does not prevents the possibility of them becoming the CEO's in future
Most people have only a handful of job experiences to think through how things work or should work, so articles like this help broaden one's perspective.
>> but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this
I think its a way to speak out and get it out there, than stay unspoken. Author as well others who share same opinion get some validation that they are not only ones.
> whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs
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"!
> random blog posts
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
> Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism
No, but the CEO will absolutely seek out my recommendations and I do read random blog posts
> 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.
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.
It might be a pipe dream but I'd like to see some sort of checklist for dev companies using hard-to-bullshit objective criteria to highlight that they either have a good culture or that their culture is toxic.
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.
yeah absolutely. In theory that was supposed to be glassdoor (or blind) but I haven't found scores there to be meaningful signals.
>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.
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
No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.
Sometimes they get it but don't know the recipe to cook it themselves so they get takeout (talent acquisition)
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.
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.
It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture.
The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful.
Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture.
Now what?
I remember the devops guys preaching about this "better culture". They talked about a no-blame culture for one. It resulted in a bunch of virtue signaling where I worked. At the end of the day, the people repeatedly causing ops related problems were canned anyway. They were still blamed of course, just behind closed doors. This "culture" went so far that there was even a company named after it called "Blameless", which fell into the depths of oblivion.
Reading your post, I just realized that "bad culture" perfectly explains what bothered me about my last workplace. So thank you for that concise tag to put on what I was seeing.
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!)
Glad I could help, but if the solution is "good culture" and culture is made by managers and C-levels, and they're not doing it, writing blogs that are, effectively, saying "good management makes people productive" is so obvious that it hardly seems worth saying.
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?
I'm sure there are such things - if you're the CEO. If you're a minion, though, then all that's available is praying, enduring, or leaving, because a minion's ability to change a toxic C-level culture is zero.
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.
My company has a great culture and also AI.
AI style writing; didn’t bother.
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
How to develop good culture? Firstly remove AI.
If this is true, almost all of big tech is becoming unproductive; so that follows.
Can we finally just admit that using AI for coding is equivalent (or maybe even slightly inferior) to web search?
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.
If your position is AI for coding is equivalent or worse than web search, I am curious how you arrived there. I could see that a few years ago, but with the state of the tooling now it is hard for me to understand.
imo we're all being treated to a live demonstration of why the pareto principle is stupid. AI agents are excellent at making prototypes, and a lot of people are happy to just stop there (well, I wouldn't say happy. More like can't/won't take ownership once the rot of code they dont understand has taken hold) I find it all the time where I start side projects but fail to feel any connection to the output, I can't show people or feel proud. I need to start trying to go back to entirely no LLMs tbh
No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.
I’m old enough to remember computers replacing thousands of pages of paper.
What does that have to do with productivity?
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.
> Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly.
Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.
this is just false...
Curious, how?
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.