[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.

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>

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

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.

A bit weird writing style, and I don’t know if this is Substack or the lack of proofreading.

It quotes a problematic statement and then after one or two paragraphs, it says this:

> But here is an important thing that many people forget:

> There is no better productivity hack than a great culture. No AI tools will provide bigger productivity gains.

> I’ve unfortunately seen and heard this sentence quite a few times, either directly or from an engineer or engineering leader who has reported that to me.

So the problematic sentence is the one that talks about a great culture being the biggest productivity hack? I had to scroll up again and see what it was referring to.

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.

After 35 years in the industry in various capacities (from architect, engineer, VP, and different products, small and large companies, ...) I can heartily confirm this.

A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least).

I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software.

If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.

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?

> Without good culture, everything else won’t work well

Except the market is full of proof this isn't true. You can still do very well with a broken culture if you have an oligopoly, through tactics like vendor lock-in, by buying up upstart competition early, using VC funding to capture the market by selling below cost, etc.

And now that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been laid off from high-paying jobs, it's an employer's market.

Good culture is hard to define. it's almost like you can see it and you can feel it, but can't replicate it

AI style writing; didn’t bother.

Does culture eat strategy for breakfast?

Wow it's like: it was before, and it still is. Truly incredible!

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

My company has a great culture and also AI.

How to develop good culture? Firstly remove AI.

smart experienced people, unencumbered

If this is true, almost all of big tech is becoming unproductive; so that follows.

[dead]

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.