What are your company's anti-values?(willsewell.com) |
What are your company's anti-values?(willsewell.com) |
I think that says enough about how company and it bosses think.
It's called "people and culture" now.
There's something broken about the highly extroverted non-technical types that are attracted to HR roles thinking they're in charge of shaping the 'culture' of an engineering organization. Please keep them far away from that particular role.
I actively try to use people instead of resources in a conversation, have never understood the need to use resources as a word.
Could be it's just a relic from the HR department.
I’ve noticed a pattern that this usage seems to be somewhat more prevalent in south Asians. (I mean this only as an observation on word choice patterns, with zero conclusion or implication on underlying thought patterns. I haven’t had enough British colleagues to notice if it came from British other-colonies roots or not.)
I don't even think it's a fight. I say "computer" when I mean computer, why wouldn't I say "people" when I mean people?
Even the original value itself was problematic since rarely was the intent positive and assuming it was based your actions on a wrong assumption. Depends on the people you work with naturally, but in this particular organisation there was an abundance of people looking out for themselves mainly; e.g. avoiding work, shedding responsibilities, lying, twisting facts, etc, and especially so in management.
The only companies I can think of who do this are the Facebook example from OP, and some of the big investment banks, who make it pretty clear that they do not give a shit about anything except how much money they make. Unfortunately it seems only assholes and sociopaths are transparent in this regard :-/
Every C-level employee is an asshole and probably a sociopath, if this was true every company would be transparent. As that isn't the case, we know that it does not necessarily have anything to do with being an asshole or a sociopath.
That's a big generalization without any argument to back it up.
My experience has been mixed, there were good ones also, but only at the small and medium sized businesses.
"Only assholes and sociopaths are transparent" does not mean "all assholes and sociopaths are transparent".
Further, you probably dont want to pick an extreme tradeoff. Getting a drop more action at the cost of huge learnings is a mistake as is getting very irrelevant knowledge at a huge cost of action.
But no, communicating feel-good meaningless statements (like asking for people to both act fast without waiting for the details and to know the details about the consequence of their actions) is an infallible way to create apathy and move away from the Pareto frontier, not towards it.
Meanwhile staying curious isn't necessarily about researching decisions in particular. It involves for instance ongoing tech education.
So if you think about it ongoing education is totally compatible with making occasional snap decisions.
"Don't be a dick" has good practical mileage.
The Kantian ideal of the Kingdom of Ends is pretty good one if you formulate it as "Don't use people", but that's too high a standard for almost any business today (especially the ones whose entire model is "using people").
One of my personal maxims is "Lead people not into temptation". In other words, no addictive (engagement) features, no lock-in, don't create dependency, make sure the code you write enables people and gives then freedom and choice (migration/federation etc). Again, those values are almost impossible to maintain in todays climate of hyper-exploitation.
Patients First
Important, not Immediate
Learners before Masters
Together, not Alone
Progress before Perfection
Adaptable, not Comfortable
Is better represented as "move fast and break important things" but what kind of management is going to sign up to that.
In essence it becomes "move fast", which becomes another way of saying, "get things done faster or you're not meeting company values and we can blame you for that." Yay for management doublespeak
They were always at least five minutes late for what should have been a five minute stand up because they knew we'd have to wait for them.
I managed to get team agreement we start no later then 2 minutes past, no matter who isn't there, management included, no judgement for late comers but the meeting is starting as we have work to get on with.
Suddenly said project manager started showing up on time. Who knew?
IOW - I see a lot of efforts at ‘curtailing’ mgmt powers. In my experience- Bottom up management or manipulation only goes so far - that’s not far. Pick your managers people. You want nice ones who also know how to hire well.
(Of course, now we do everything remote, so I wouldn’t even know if they are early)
I just don't understand some people.
Drucker - 'The Practice of Management' is full of common sense 'anti-values'
That wfh means you work in every time zone.
Values go out of the window real quick whenever they negatively impact revenue, whatever they are.
I like the idea of anti values, certainly much better, but even there you might as well not have them imo.
Making money is just one of the operational constraints that a company has to take into account.
Companies exist to fulfil a purpose. That purpose is not just "make money".
Steve Jobs founded Apple not to just "make money". I think this does not need further elaboration.
The same applies to Tesla and SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk.
Companies that only exist to make money are probably terrible by any measure you choose.
Hopefully, however, profit is correlated with/caused by providing value to humanity, which in turn encourages "good behavior" from companies. If a company is seen as "bad", it starts to lose clients.
My point is; As long as making money and their values align it's all good, but if decisions need to be made that present a choice between values and profit/growth it becomes very hard to choose for values. Especially once a company goes public, gets acquired, or needs significant investment, it might not even have the option to live by its values.
That's why I think values are only real/true if they align with profit/growth. Similar to what the article describes; what do they really mean? How much impact do they really have? How much of it is PR?
What it comes down to imo is; Is there willingness to sacrifice growth and revenue for values? I'd say in most cases the answer to that is no, and I would much prefer it if companies are just clear and honest about that.
If you do count other forms of companies, like not-for-profits, then it's a totally different story of course.
TL;DR PC means Personal Computer, Linux PC, Mac PC, Windows PC.
The article says people should state values as a tradeoff. So for google it should have been something like:
Favor not being evil over making more money.
A truly uncompromising value, if that was the intent of Google's motto, sits at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the tradeoff is literally everything else.
Toyota is a great company to work for, albeit super boring.
This is the most insightful comment I've read this week. I'm surprised no one has made the connection before. It has deep historical meaning and deep implications for where we're headed.
They state that they value (as an example) individuals and interactions over processes and tools. But they make it clear that while there's value in the things on the right, they value the things on the left more.
In the way the author describes, I always found this framing to be super helpful for decision-making.
It's also something that frustrated me about the (otherwise fantastic) Amazon Leadership Principles. When should I dive deep and when should I have bias for action? I realise now that I should have bias for action when it's a reversible decision and dive deep when it's a one way door. But it's not clear from the principles themselves in the way it's clear in the Agile Manifesto.
Choosing "don't be evil" as a credo deliberately encourages others to view the company through a moral lens. It is an invitation to judge the company according to a higher standard than most businesses would hold themselves to. It makes explicit that the company takes responsibility for the moral implications of what they do instead of pretending to live in an amoral value-free universe like many other corporations do.
I think it was a courageous motto and I'm sad they dropped it.
I didn't expect to read that ethical and boring are aligned during Black History Month (US).
Boring in manufacturing is good.
Given those facts, I didn't see why a further paragraph of background would be valuable: My point would not land with more people regardless of whether or not I wrote that paragraph.
"Either you share my twisted view of the world or you don't. I choose not to believe that others can objectively evaluate evidence, and there's the risk that they may not come to the same conclusion that I did."
> My point would not land with more people regardless of whether or not I wrote that paragraph.
It would, if you could provide me with some data that supports your generalization. If it was true, surely there would be some research backing it up.
A clear example would be cops and cashiers at Walmart. The later can hardly mess with you at all, even if he would be a bad person.
On the other hand security guards at night clubs and cops have about the same opportunity to mess with me, and I can easily say the guards on average are worse people.
Of course that isn't actual data, but the analysis explores the idea that only sociopaths make it to the top in a great deal more depth, if what you're looking for is depth of background and understanding of where this idea comes from, rather than why this specific person who you responded to believes it to be true.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Unwillingness to accidentally act like an asshole makes it impossible to act swiftly and decisively unless you trust yourself to be infallible in your judgement.
This is not the same as habitually acting like an asshole.
Why is that a requirement to be "really C-level"?
Also your problem is that you favor evil ways of making money, but don't call it evil, instead of owning the evil.
When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs. "Multi-player is the most fun mode," is a better razor because if you're trying to decide which features to cut, the single player ones are clearly it.
"Anti-value" is, I think, another way to say something similar.
This touches on a cognitive mistake I see often. We often naturally think of choices in terms of "yes or no". Do I want to go out for dinner tonight? Should I ask that person out? Should I buy that house?
But opportunity cost pervades all aspects of life. Our time and resources are finite and any "yes" choice is implicitly a "no" to the other options that give up the capacity to say yes to. It's very hard to make good choices without thinking of those other options.
Framing your values in terms of "razors" or "anti-values" is a good way to get out of the "yes/no" mindset and into the more accurate "which one" mindset. It helps you discriminate among options.
coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), frequent non-skippable dialogue, etc. Why is that not the case?
A game is a very carefully balanced hanging mobile of hundreds of parts and it's very hard to tweak one without risking throwing others off. Inventory management might be tedious, but it may be that simplifying that throws off other more critical game mechanics. Or it could be that the feature ended up being made worse in the process of fixing an even more important mechanic and now the team has simply run out of time to circle back and improve it.
> frequent non-skippable dialogue
Dialog usually is skippable, but if it's not, there could be reasons. For example, games pretty often rely on unskippable transitions to load content in the background and minimize time spent staring at a loading screen.
Saying "make the game fun" is about as actionable as telling a musician to "write a good song".
But going further, fun is not found in any particular feature; it’s an outcome of the total system. A game can be described as fun, or a sequence of events, but you can’t say that a helicopter spawn in an FPS is fun, or not, without further diving into all of the surrounding context.
And you dig deep enough and you realize that it’s not the helicopter specifically that you’re looking for — it’s the action-space it enables, or the potential counter-play (or lack thereof), or the satisfaction in steering, or that it’s simply the act of being rewarded for skilled play, or whatever.
Fun is at best a description that the game and its mechanisms didn’t impede the mechanisms you enjoyed operating.
It’s also why you have an internet argument where someone says “this game is not good, for reasons x,y,z”, and the response is simply “but I enjoyed it”, and it blows up into a nonsensical mess — the two are talking about totally different things; fun is only marginally correlated with good
I used to work with a great designer who used to say the goal was to take the un-fun out. That actually is a more actionable goal.
In the example given, adding something to multiplayer isn't more fun for people who don't play multiplayer, but it may well be for those that do and since they're the focus, the feature gets added. So "prioritize multiplayer" is a useful razor because you can act on it: does it add to multiplayer? yes, it gets kept, no it gets cut. Its actionable. Is it fun? Who knows, you gotta test it out first.
> I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), frequent non-skippable dialogue, etc.
These things are fun to many people. Just not you. Sometimes they are fun to me, usually not. I think "this game is fun" would lead to including more of this stuff, not less.
YouTubers in particular seem to like this kind of stuff.
Think of it as setting achievable goals for yourself. "I want to improve my life!" is a useless objective; while "my appartment is dirty and I want it to be clean" is a useful one.
"Improving one's life" is so vague it's useless (are we talking about love? Health? Work? Family? Housing? Would you even know what to suggest to someone asking you for advice about this?) while "my apartment is dirty" is a clear objective with clearer solutions: "I'll clean it more often/hire a housekeeper".
"The game isn't fun" is just as vague, especially when you have to make choices regarding resources/money, and especially when "fun" is so different depending on people. If we're talking the Sims, for instance, some people will find more fun in creating sims; some, in creating houses; some, in actually playing with their sims. In this context, trying to make the game "more fun" would be meaningless. "These three sides of the game should feel equally developed" is already a bit better, though still very subjective.
Compare that to "is this usable in multiplayer", "does it serve a narrative purpose", "can we show it in a trailer". All of those are quick to answer (but not all of them make for good games).
> adequate performance gets a generous severance package
> We’re a team, not a family; We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team
My initial approach to the values was a similar "Who cares, these are bland corporatese" one. It wasn't until a 10+ year senior engineer on my team discussed the trade-offs between the values in an architecture meeting that I really understood the purpose. Take two of the values[1]:
"Dive deep" vs "Bias for action" - these have an inherent tension between the two. You can justify any action with either one, but it is about knowing when to apply what. You do not want to be Diving Deep as your first action when you are oncall and your alarms are going off in every direction, but it may need to be your third.
"Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit" has opposite ideas written into it! Having backbone is about being able to back up your position with as much data and research as you can. Disagree and Commit is about not being emotionally invested in your position and not taking things personally when the team chooses to go another way. It is recognizing the fact that you may be working in an area of ambiguity where no one side can be proven right before the fact.
Like most worthy things in life, there is a lot of nuance to these that cannot be expressed in a pithy 140 (or 280) character limit. But the idea that you should have "anti-values" is a very, very useful one. It allows you to think through different scenarios and explain what your team/organization/company would prioritize when there are competing priorities.
I think for us, an implied anti-value would be "Focus on the core product and say no to some customers"
As OP said, no-one would deny that focusing on the core product is bad but at what cost? We have failed in the past by taking on custom work for the cash, and it helped us bootstrap. But to scale, the custom work needs to go away and we need to give the maximum value to the broadest number of customers through the core offering.
You can tell difference between focus on the product and focus on yourself with metrics and how readily people are eager to ignore numbers using excuses from poorly formed reasoning reflective of a more honest intent.
“The more important you are, the less you touch code/servers/things”
“Lots of meetings means you’re important.” (People will frequently humblebrag “I have 13 meetings today”)
“Create a problem, present a problem, let someone else solve, celebrate the solution.”
There’s also many positive values that I think outweigh these anti-values.
I love being presented with puzzles and problems. I hate people messing up, creating crises, and pushing the mess off to other people.
"Descriptive" vs "aspirational" values, if you will.
I want to be a good husband, dedicated employee, etc. Am I? I’d like to think more often than not. But we all err, and I value the transparency/courage to ack that we are not perfect on our values and still have a long way to go.
For me the a flag would be if a person/company is not willing to acknowledge they are not as good as they public values are. (Because how can they improve if they can’t even ack it).
* The actual values have changed over time but the value statement hadn't been updated in a while
* Different parts of the company genuinely have different values
I don't think either of those necessarily indicate a toxic culture.
I’m not sure i could ask smart and direct enough questions to really assess this but hope i can at least sniff out the bs.
A couple of the values pulled out here are from the Amazon Leadership Principles. So there's actually an answer to this question! The opposite of "Learn and Be Curious" is "Bias for Action" and "Deliver Results". The Amazon LPs are designed to have tension with each other. You can't embody all of them at the same moment. Which ones you prioritize are contextually dependent. Which is also helpful for dealing with conflict and disagreement because so many arguments are people talking past each other not realizing that they're actually misaligned on an underlying assumption and wasting energy arguing about how to execute.
"I don't think this is a good path forward, we should take our time to 'Dive Deep' and do more research"... "Ah, that's the issue. We've already agreed as a group the prioritize for 'Bias for Action' because of <reasons>"... "Hrm. In that case I can understand why this path makese sense. If you're all confident that's the right priority here then let's go."
Without that understanding, it's like there is a hierarchy of companies where the companies where everyone "gets it" on revenue are in their massive exponential growth phase like startups with small teams, then there are the ones who factor it out into KPIs, and the job is literally to move the line on that KPI at scale without any other deep understanding, but their company explosive phase is over and their growth is linear - and then the final company type is where the real revenue factors are effectively secret, and there is a solid long term cash flow the company mainly optimizes its costs over, with no significant forseeable growth other than stock volatility.
Depending on the growth phase of the organization, values and anti-values are sort of moot, as it's a question of what real growth factors your teams understand and are aligned with pushing in a confluent direction. I'd be concerned if someone were sincerely indexed on values, as it seems like a substute for, "we do this thing well that solves this problem for these customers and that makes money so that we can support our families," and anything beyond that seems kind of weird in comparison.
Sure, I've worked for pre-PMF companies that looking back I suspect they were in-effect NFTs for financial/portfolio engineering so there wasn't really a clear way to make money, and they spent a lot of time on inspirational values stories, but that effort should have been spent on finding product market fit.
To me, the only meaningful values quesiton is, when you know who the customers are, do you want to solve that problem for those people? Seems straightforward.
It seems to imply that a "value" means "more". It does not. "Frugality" is a value of that is a behaviour deemed important to follow, it's not an "anti-value" (whatever that might mean).
Similarly, "move fast, break things" means you value action and risk-taking.
I was expecting "anti-value" to mean a behaviour deemed negative and to be avoided.
Like in 'move fast and break things', you are willing to compromise reliability/stability in favour of speed.
"Frugality" is a bit less explicit than "move fast _and break things_. I think the reason it could be considered an anti-value is because it implies obvious _costs_. For example it can cost time in "shopping around", or it could mean that you miss out on opportunities - for example missing out on a great employee because you pay below market rate.
Overly cautious, ponderous delivery is the negative behavior to be avoided if you value “move fast, break things”.
"Break things" is also obviously not to be understood in isolation. Of course breaking things for no reason is not positive. It means that you will break things if you move fast and take risk and that it is unavoidable and worth it.
But that’s only what is desired by the company. Individuals inside the company still push people to do things quickly at the expense of quality.
We also have leadership principles: ‘Play a team sport: so keep discussing everything with everyone until nobody disagrees (either through actual agreement or exhaustion)’.
Another thing; as this one says, the values are the rules (well, should be). Breaking (intentionaly) them is a compromise needed sometimes. While not following, is different matter.. https://8thlight.com/blog/stephen-prater/2020/09/15/values-r...
I'm a Lego Serious Play certified facilitator and what we do with one of our workshops is helping organizations defining what we call Simple Guiding Principles (SGP). SGP's are identified by an org as a set of principles that can help guide autonomous decision making.
The example "Optimise learning over focus" is a perfect SGP as it gives the individual a practical principle to follow, for example when prioritizing his/her time.
*Maximum 25 days a year after 15 years of employment
- You can't even get paroled.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210311001446/https://www.aussi...
Edit: Switched to an archive.org version in response to comments about a captcha being used at the source URL.
Ubi amicita est, ibi idem velle et idem nolle.
"True friendship is in, same likes and same dislikes." [1]
Is the best radar (sonar?) I've found to predict and sense how shallow or deep a friendship with any person you'll have.
Now you can use it as a generator of the types of relations with individuals that you company has/wants to have: founders, developers, marketeers, commercial, support, partners and customers.
[1] So the dislikes part you might take it as the anti-value notion proposed here but is still a value.
PS: about the anti-value notion, I think we're still talking about values. Like a value matrix you have in your deep psychology that is symmetrical. It has the values of the things you're attracted to and the things you are repelled from. Like all the cells in the matrix being little vectors that will eventually synthesise a final position on everything you input.
On the other hand, almost all companies also say that they value their employees and want to respect their work-life balance and QoL.
But what about when a deliverable is going to be late and it will negatively impact a customer. What do you do then? Crunch hard to ship on time so the customer is impacted? Tell your customer the deliverable will be late so your employees can go home and spend time with their families? Try to split the difference down the middle and probably annoy everyone?
That's when values get interesting. When they stop being a list of nice things, and start being a framework for how you intend to behave in difficult circumstances.
Uber once had a stated company value of “Always be hustling”. Really.
Similarly, a company's anti-values could be discovered by who gets less; e.g. passed over for promotion, given a 'window seat', laid off, etc.
As a software developer this is quite nebulous. The bank protects its reputation by prioritizing risk analysis and ethics first in all its internal decisions. As an industry these qualities do not exist in any professional capacity in software. In software, just like in absolutely every employer, we do whatever we want so long as it eases hiring, everything else be damned.
It doesn't always make sense though. The only company I've worked at whose values actually resonated with me, and evidently a lot of other people there, was at Maersk. They are [1]:
* Constant care * Humbleness * Uprightness * Our employees * Our name
They were a great place to work and I saw those values embodied there. Hard to see what the anti values would be for those.
The basic principle they are working on is building trust.
* avoid negativity
* hide the truth
* ego outperforms facts
* kiss ass
* promote incompetence
* stick to your gunsMy current employer's approved hotel list is pretty ritzy, much nicer places than I would stay in on leisure travel... and that's kind of the least they can do to offset the general imposition of work travel.
I don't know about you, but if my salary was $500k+ [1] I'd probably fly business class and stayed at the best hotels when I go on vacation.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Netflix/salaries/Software-Eng...
A recruiting process which discriminates against people who do not share their values will create a more secure sense of belonging among people who do -- even among underprivileged groups who would otherwise worry they do not really fit in.
I don't find anything in that deck even remotely toxic. I find it almost jaw-droppingly honest!
I thought them to be refreshing honest and clear (but have not yet read all slides).
I mean, it is also not attractive for me, because I would not put what is good for Netflix, over what is good for me - but otherwise I do not think a professional, internal competing sports team as a goal, is necessarily toxic.
My interview was cancelled halfway through because the third interviewer didn't like me. shrug
Independent decision-making is also hard to do, as soon as something requires a budget, you can forget about the independent part.
And maybe you can have fewer rules, but instead they will be labelled processes and generally end up having the same effect.
I do agree that highly effective people should be kept, e.g. people who are not afraid to move out of their chosen comfort zone once in a while.
If I should state two core values, they would be critical thinking and curiosity.
I previously felt these contradictions are problematic because they make it harder to use values for prioritisation. It's a good point you make about different values being applicable in different contexts. I wonder whether the context can be incorporated into the value?
For example "Bias for action when the cost of failure is low". In an oncall incident, restarting a stateless service is worth trying even before the problem is understood in depth, because risk of failure is low. There are potential actions in an oncall incident that could quite easily make things much worse - then it's probably worth diving deeper before taking action.
It might not be pithy enough for the value itself, but I think it's at least adding this kind of context to the subtext like Amazon have done in the page you linked to.
> bias for action when it's a reversible decision
Most teams also have a set of tenets they embrace that are more team-local refinements of what you stand for and how you work. The group I was in had “Bias for Action” and “Earn Trust” as the things to prioritise. Make customers happy, increase their trust in you along the way, deliver results, and do it quickly… it made for a simple framework for decisions and left a lot of autonomy for working out your own plans for execution. You don’t need to reach consensus on _how_ you’re going to do it. Just do it.
So no True Scottsman^h^h^h^h good leader would ever be confused about which LP applied
Though both explanations may also point to something:
* If values changed, but company did not bother to communicate them, then they are not important and not applied in daily life. This is not necessarily a bad thing at the moment of observation, but it may lay a foundation to toxic culture eventually.
* If different parts of the company have different values, then the decisions where those values would have been applied may result in a conflict between those parts. Red flag.
Value: move fast (positive)
Anti-value: break things (negative)
Breaking things is not positive normally, but it's the compromise for moving fast.
Invest in people understanding the reasons for something, and allow them to ensure it's upheld. A relevant domain-less software analogy is testing; you can mandate some level of testing, and it will be a burden, a morale killer, and constantly fail to be upheld, or you can work to ensure everyone understands the benefits of testing, create space for people to write tests and automate their execution, and then rely on culture to ensure testing happens. I've been in places that tried to mindlessly mandate corporate policies to ensure compliance; it resulted in delays and low morale, and extremely patchwork adherence (I left that place still not knowing if we were compliant or not). I've also been at a place that implemented SOX compliance; they didn't mandate anything, just "we're becoming part of a publicly traded company. Here is what the goal is. Here is some training to help understand what sorts of things we now need to be mindful of. Here is a person who you can talk to to help understand what that means for you. This is our highest priority right now". Morale stayed high, the results were good, and completion was -early-.
>> as soon as something requires a budget
Everything requires a budget. Headcount is a budget. The point is give people problems to solve, the relevant constraints, and let them work, rather than micromanage the solution. Maybe that's an industry failure, but don't confuse it for a unique constraint on that industry, rather than just a universal problem in that industry.
>> And maybe you can have fewer rules, but instead they will be labelled processes
Process exceptions exist. Rule breaking exists. And failure to break process/rules when you should have happens too. The point isn't to not have a sensible default, but to instead arm people with knowledge so that they pick the default when it makes sense to, and deviate when it makes sense to. It's the same distinction around "best practices"; they're not, they're just reasonable defaults. And by not dictating a process, you allow evolution in the de facto process the teams follow, to improve the process. I've seen companies attempt to revamp their internal processes from a top-down model: universally not pretty. I've also seen teams and departments retro and iterate, and see constant improvements.
Because there's nothing on that comment that actually supports the difference. And if you are being honest, descriptive values should describe your behavior very closely.
Value: be great at everything all the time
Parent: I try very hard but often fail
You: then you must be dishonest about your values
Humility is a virtue not a vice.
Hum, no, but then he is talking about the "aspirational values" that the GP pointed.
That's an insane amount of money! And against that figure business-class tickets ($10k) and fine hotels ($5k/night) are accessible. But significant. You are probably traveling several times a year, and not solo. Blink and you'll piss it all away.
Even pro sports teams have paid support staff working with the "players".
People distrust "we're a family" because it's an illusion, not because of the potential for an actual sort of "family" or friendship. But they may also come to distrust "we're not a family" once it becomes as cliche and they realize that every company they work for that makes such a claim will inevitably devolve into making the employee-employer relationship out to be more than it actually is or should be.
I disbelieve most corporate values because companies are run by humans, and humans are pretty bad at self evaluation. Well, that and I've had enough experience to tell me that explicitly stated corporate values usually mean very little in practice. Only you can unveil a company's values, though that's no easy task beyond some basic red/green flags.
Of course I am assuming those that use said mantra are refering to the touchy feely version of family and we are not going down the 'what does family mean anyway' rabbit hole, where rivalry even Fratricide and Parricide, they even have a word for killing a family member.
Q: What's our working definition for "toxicity", specifically in the workplace?
I'm not sure they're nearly as orthogonal as one might think. My experiences of toxic workplaces involved a great deal of dishonest behaviour and I'm struggling to recall much if any honesty.
The reason I believe they're showing a work environment that would be toxic to me, is that the line "> adequate performance gets a generous severance package" does not stand alone, it's only part of it, they're giving me the general vibe that I should be constantly scared of being the next one to go, that my best will only be good enough until they find someone better..
I don't mind competition, there's always competition, but for me personally, I don't want fierce competition and high pressure to be part of my daily life, not outside recreational activities where the stakes are "get fired for doing an adequate job". I like to do more than is expected, but if what is expected is by definition more than what is needed, well, then I would have to do more than more than what is needed, I don't even know what that is, and I'd not want to constantly think about it and wear myself down from trying to achieve it.
Do (m)any companies attempt to drive sales by describing a product as "adequate"?
If your child sits a school test and the teacher describes the result as "adequate" would you be content?
In the workplace why wouldn't one want to always aim to do "good" work (which is very definitely one step above "adequate"). That doesn't mean amazing, outstanding or exceptional. It also doesn't imply pressure.
Why would anyone approach a keyboard if they weren't attempt to do something good?
Put another way, who gets out of bed aiming to be adequate? It's not like it even sounds like an aim, it sounds like it happens when you're not paying attention.
I've taken biz class before when it made sense (e.g. $1500 from Beijing to LA one way when economy cost $1000 for the same trip). I've also stayed in a $400/night pool villa in Bali (with a $900 round trip biz class ticket from Beijing via Hong Kong...but that was a steal, RIP Hong Kong Express Airlines), both worth it, both seemed really luxurious to me, I can't imagine doing more than that (though I guess with today's high inflation, it is inevitable that the $400 pool villa will cost $1000 soon).
Lots of software I write just has to be "adequate" because the consequence of failure is minimal.
..asked a comment on Hacker News. Maybe 'good' would be better replaced with 'of high quality'. Maybe.
That said, I personally feel like the mentality of "We will fire you if you aren't doing an _exceptional_ job" reads as a serious red flag. The implication here is that you should expect to work overtime and prioritize your job over all else. Even then, we might still fire you.
Of course I'd rather have a company being open and upfront about their unsustainable expectations, but I'd still prefer a company that values work/live balance of their employees. Would I say that Netflix's approach is toxic? Honestly, yes. But I do understand that this is just my own opinion.
I don't think that's right. The slide says:
"""
Hard Work — Not Relevant
We don't measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office
[...]
Sustained B-level performance despite effort generates severance
Sustained A-level performance despite minimal effort is rewarded
"""
The message seems to be that you don't have to work hard. They seem to say they want lazy employees that have a good work life balance, because they finish work early.
Whether that's toxic or not, that's another question. But I don't think they value overtime at all.
But they do value putting the company over yourself (and your real family).
This can probably have very toxic effects, if you are having problems at home for example (sick kids or whatever) and all they allways care about, is your performance right now. So definitely not the place for me - as I would never put a company over my children (and it sounds like this is expected, even though they would likely never phrase it this way), but there are people without family, who have their work as top priority, so this might work out for them.
There are a handful of people that are capable of producing "Sustained A-level performance" and for them this workplace probably seems ideal.
Even for the engineers that could reach this bar, it's a very high standard to apply constantly. There's another slide that gives a slight allowance for temporary performance issues, but that lack of security is hard for most people.
Slide 34 to be exact says this about Loyalty. "People who have been stars for us, and hit a bad patch, get a near term pass because we think they are likely to become stars for us again."
"A bad patch" is pretty loosely defined, if you burn out achieving something, or are assigned a problem that is particularly difficult, how much leeway do you have?
I don't think it would be an environment I would particularly enjoy, but I think to the original post's point this is a pretty great set of values because it really clearly articulates the trade-offs. If you are a 10x engineer and hate working at $current_company because they care about hard work and that's frustrating because you work smart not hard and you are comfortable with your career being contingent on consistent high performance, then Netflix is the place for you. If you work hard but think this would burn you out, look somewhere else. And that's what values should do, declare the trade-offs and take a firm stance on which things you value.
I mean, as long as this is a individual decision, that would be allright with me - but pay does not negate toxic. It only makes it bearable.
But like stated above, I do not say that Netflix culture is toxic, as they are clear about what they expect: top performance above everything else. That this can lead to toxic situations, as we all are not only having good times - should be clear to anyone applying. But I suppose even at netflix they are aware of this and hopefully have plans to deal with temporary burn outs, other than instantly firing those underperformers.
Does Netflix actually have such a cutthroat culture? I have no idea.
The slides are a bit contradictory. They talk about only keeping top talent but then also mention a major/minor league analogy. So what's the culture, really?
I'm not excusing it, but I can see people putting off firing under-performers just to avoid feeling like shit.
Now, it is toxic if a mediocre organization tries to fire a particular good performer because they aren't exceptional, when clearly the rest of the organization also isn't exceptional. That is dishonest, delusional, etc.
Also, I don't see anything wrong with choosing to mop the floor - especially if you're really good at it.
You find out your brother is pocketing part of the tips that are supposed to go to the back of the house.
Your son has been accused of sexual harassment by one of the waitresses.
What do you do? You're not going to "take it to HR". Any action you take here is going to be painful and is going to be challenged by other members of the family with an equal stake.
So I immediately recoil when I hear that I'm "family". Oh, you're going to look the other way when I get caught embezzling? We'll work something out when I get caught the second time? Didn't think so.
Being a "pro sportsteam" on the other hand could be considered toxic. I know of no more cut throat legal business than sports. They are aggressivly signaling that they push KPI missers out.
Probably works well in NHL when you draft each year anyway and players do the same thing, like dentists.
My belief is that continuation is way more important than stars. Especially since recruiting (and not fireing) stars is a more or less random process anyway.
I imply unreasonable KPIs. Also, "right to work" has more in common with North Korean job safety (i.e. none) than say Spannish dito.
Reading the whole slide back to back, I am a bit disgusted. It is so smug. It is trying to be brutally honest, but it feels more like a cult pep-talk. The place like doubled it workforce in four years -- there is not way to be elite after that, even if they were before ...
Source: I come from a family with many addicts: two uncles, sister, brother, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, cousin, great uncle, great aunt, three aunts, myself.
Granted, it's easier to hide this now when everyone's working from home.
> I’ve worked with people who could accomplish as much in two hours as I did in two days. Would it be “toxic” to work in such an environment?
No, why would that be toxic?
No. Why would you think so?
My point is a company that offers top compensation can and should demand top performance.
Oh boy, I guess you don’t follow sports too closely. There is endless debate about rankings and player value and statistics.
But I am digressing.
I would love to work in an extremely competitive environment where slackers are punished.
And here I was thinking this whole thread was about that question ...
"My point is a company that offers top compensation can and should demand top performance. "
Anyway, sure they can. But no company can expect from me, to put the company over my self. A good company has those goals aligned. I get money - and they get performance. Win win. But I will not work to death for them, as then all my money would be worthless.
That is - no for-profit company can expect this from me. A non-profit on the other hand, that has truly utilitarian goals, that really benefit humanity - I might consider putting myself aside. But why should anyone sacrifice himself, so a company makes more money? That doesn't make sense to me. But of course it makes sense, that companies want their employes give everything to them.
Yes, I agree, they should not have said that. That should have been left implicit. When a certain pay threshold is crossed (e.g. triple the industry average), I would expect them to expect extra from me. This might mean working nights/weekends if that's necessary for me to be "top performer" compared to my peers. Netflix expects you to keep up with their performance standards. They don't care how you do it - by working overtime, or being brilliant and working 2 hours a day, it simply does not matter, just like in professional sports. If, as you said, you get money, they get performance, it's a win win. But if you get money, but they don't get the expected performance, you can't blame it on toxic culture. If your peers are delivering and you're not, then you're toxic, and you should probably look for an easier job with less pay.
If I'm a manager and I notice someone is consistently underperforming (compared to his peers) - it does not matter if the rest of the team is working overtime, or is smarter, or more experienced - I don't care. I will ask the underperformer to step it up (again, don't care if this means working harder, or smarter), and if no improvement after a set period, I will be looking for a replacement. I'm paying top dollar for top performance.
This situation is normal and expected in professional sports. I don't remember hearing about "bad work/life balance", or "being pressured into doing overtime" in conversations about elite athletes' performance. Should we treat elite SWEs differently?
If they're open about expectations, assuming I'm at a point in my life where the trade-off makes sense, then if the compensation is good, that's fantastic. Nothing toxic about that. Not that different from some US manufacturing workers getting paid hourly wages, who make the same kind of trade-off all the time, making damn good money for 60 hours of peak performance a week. Sure, they might end up paying for it by ruining their bodies and drop dead from a heart attack or stroke within a year of retirement if they make it that long, but the risks are no secret.
> This situation is normal and expected in professional sports.
Let's google. The NFL seems topical around this time of year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/heres-what-the-average-nfl-p...
> The minimum annual salary for a rookie active roster player with a one-year contract is $480,000 . . . A player with three years’ experience would command a salary equal to at least $705,000, while players with seven to nine years on the field must be paid at least $915,000 . . . the average NFL salary was only about $2.7 million in 2017 . . . That’s less than three-quarters of the average $4 million earnings of a major league baseball player and less than half the typical wage of NBA players, who earn about $7.1 million on average.
I take everything back! Let's not treat SWEs any differently. For that kind of money, I will gladly put in 80 hours a week.
So yeah, it seems like we are in agreement :)
This isn't just about Netflix. The over-arching topic is company anti-values. The context has narrowed since then, first to Netflix, then to a specific slide about not measuring people by hours worked, and so on. But for the heck of it, some other quotes from said slide deck:
> We don't measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office
> Actual company values are the behaviors and skills that are valued in fellow employees.
> Honesty Always
> Pro Sports Team Metaphor is Good, but Imperfect
> Internal "cutthroat" or "sink or swim" behavior is rare and not tolerated.
Again, if the expectation for a workplace like that were 60-80 hours a week, and that fact is clearly and openly communicated, fine.
But if you're making those claims while your top performers are the ones putting in undocumented additional hours and pressuring others to do the same, then I insist that is toxic behavior. Yes, even if they don't brag about work/life balance, though I'll consider it even worse if they do.
> So yeah, it seems like we are in agreement :)
All sarcasm aside, no, we're definitely not!
What if your peers actually worked 2 hours a day, and accomplished a lot more than you when you worked 8 hours a day? Would you feel pressured to put in more hours? Would this be toxic?
I believe the question is relevant because you seem to equate delivering results with working long hours, and while the two are usually correlated, it might not be the case when talking about star performers. For example, if my peers are all like Jeff Dean in terms of productivity, I would probably feel inadequate. You could even say I would feel pressured into doing more - not by my peers or even my manager - I'd be pressuring myself. This, to me, does not mean the environment is toxic. And that's why I believe the environment at Netflix is not toxic (assuming no other issues).
I'm trying to understand what you mean by "toxic", that's why I keep asking the question.