Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI (newsletter.eng-leadership.com)

313 pointsby gpi12 hours ago73 comments

dirtbag__dad 4 hours ago

[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.

ahsteele 2 hours ago

> 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.

Throughout my career, I’ve described this as “polite persistence is how you effect change.”

roncesvalles 43 minutes ago

>Org pays market rate and has good benefits.

This is so important. One of the things that kills company culture before the company even takes off is getting a sense from the founders that they're just trying to fool desperate/clueless people into working for them for less than what they're worth.

The startups that actually succeed have the philosophy "find the best people and pay them a lot". All the successful unicorns and decacorns over the last 15 years have a reputation of paying people well. There is literally not one startup I can think of that succeeded but has a reputation of underpaying.

And if you're unable to pay employees well then you're simply not well-capitalized enough and should drop the project.

zug_zug 11 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>

cryzinger 10 hours ago

> 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?

sandeepkd 10 hours ago

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

tyre 4 hours ago

Yes, this. It’s also a great way to find similarly-minded people and work with them.

saghm 10 hours ago

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.

DrJokepu 9 hours ago

> 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

throw8383784 9 hours ago

> 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"!

sailfast 3 hours ago

My assumption was that engineers were building an AI system to do this, not that they only made PRs from tickets - but I could be wrong.

pydry 8 hours ago

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.

zug_zug 8 hours ago

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.

jubilanti 8 hours ago

> 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

bitwize 8 hours ago

> 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.

truncate 7 hours ago

>> 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.

wocram 6 hours ago

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.

tikhonj 5 hours ago

Part of the value is to help the people stuck in bad cultures realize that it's the culture that's broken, not them. It's easy to lose sight of that! If you can recognize it, it's easier to do something about it whether that's changing your behavior and expectations, trying to change the culture bottom up or leaving altogether.

thephyber 5 hours ago

> Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random blog posts for constructive criticism?

The CEO (or at least the founder) created and cultivated the culture of the company thus far. If the culture is bad, they are the single largest reason why.

You are right in that execs won't seek out the blog article which criticizes their strategy... unless they actually want to steelman against their own position (which is a very useful activity but few people do it).

But the CEO doesn't need to find it on their own. They surround their self with a Board, investors, sales people, managers / leadership team, people from their MBA program, etc. the article just has to plant a seed which grows somewhere in that ecosystem.

That said, the article may not be right. The largest and most successful companies in the world aren't the ones with the best company culture. They simply work in industries where the money is so prolific that the people who want to work in the industry are already highly motivated. The CEO doesn't need access to this information because it isn't true; it simply tickles your cognitive biases.

LPisGood an hour ago

How do you effectively steelman against your own position without a dynamic “adversary” responding to counter-claims? I feel like every static argument except the most absolutely resolute is vulnerable.

chanux 3 hours ago

> But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this.

Good question.

Personally, it feels good to read these when stuck in a bad situation/culture. Feels good (relieving) to write too. I don't really believe these reach and/or change the relevant category of people.

sghiassy 7 hours ago

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

CSMastermind 7 hours ago

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.

mohamedkoubaa 7 hours ago

Sometimes they get it but don't know the recipe to cook it themselves so they get takeout (talent acquisition)

danpalmer 6 hours ago

It's hard because you have to constantly make "sub-optimal" decisions. If you optimise for things you can measure, or at least see right now, you get a low performing team of high performers, or you get a collection of local maxima. Optimising for a global maximum requires making decisions that have unclear pay-off, that are harder to justify. Another problem is that one of these decisions that was actually wrong, vs one that hasn't paid off yet, look the same.

I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.

jmalicki 5 hours ago

There's also the executive's incentives, and "I'll be gone, you'll be gone": the payoff for that is very long, and it will be hard for them to take credit, and their own tenure might not be as long as that team's.

antod 4 hours ago

Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem.

The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers.

The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team

apical_dendrite 6 hours ago

AI seems to compound this issue. One person can appear incredibly productive, say by submitting a huge volume of PRs, but that can slow down the rest of the team by deluging them with PRs and operational issues that they have to solve.

jmalicki 5 hours ago

This is why I strongly like on-call.

A lot of people hate it, but if you have a rotation, that will force this person to deal with what they create during their rotations, and the operational issues will be an explicit part of your job when you're dealing with them.

When it kind of goes to random people, the conscientious people who fix the bugs and operational issues look unproductive, and the aggressive people throwing slop over the wall who never bother look great.

Forcing this through a rotating cast, and having other people not worry about it unless management decides it's too much for one person and they need help during this rotation, really avoids some of the most toxic outcomes around this.

On-call doesn't have to mean someone is getting paged at 3am. It does mean everyone rotates through, and it is clear who has the monkey, so you don't have passive-aggressive vs. conscientious behavior hiding issues like that.

ghosty141 6 hours ago

Imo a good example are soccer teams. To be in the top 5 the team has to work as one hivemind which only works if the people making up the team (coaches and players) actually work together on both the sport side as well as on the social side of things.

Different to corporate jobs those teams spend tremendous amounts on scouting, analysis etc.. They don't just look for the best player but also one who fits as a person.

I think the core issue is that management hasn't picked this up yet and understanding team chemistry etc is totally undervalued. I'd argue this is partly due to this being hard to measure and very hard to do.

johnnyanmac an hour ago

Executives can fire individuals and keep the train running for a while. They can't fire "teams" unless they know that product doesn't need to be maintained anymore.

This might just be hanlon's razor and I'm overthinking it, but part of me wonders if it's less "executives don't get it" and more "executives do not want to get it".

roncesvalles 35 minutes ago

The real test of this is whether a manager can fire their single most productive employee because he/she is ruining the social harmony of the team.

I've seen managers in my career bend over backward to protect people who were outright abusive to their coworkers but were individually very productive. Those managers didn't go very far. Your team is not a car collection.

riffic 6 hours ago

Studies have been performed and they come to the conclusion the highest performing teams are the ones with greatest psychological safety:

https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

aesthetics1 10 hours ago

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.

andrii 7 hours ago

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.

sph87 6 hours ago

Welcome to a day in the life. The company I work for prides themselves on a culture of agency and letting developers be developers. I am pushing the AI revolution but the compliance requirements and modern Luddite zeitgeist are a daily source of frustration. If the AI isn’t perfect then it’s slop. But we’ll gladly excuse the existing 2 million lines of spaghetti code because of past deadlines and lack of resources to pay down the tech debt today. Fingers crossed though. Every failure brings you one step closer to an inevitable success.

AnonHP an hour ago

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.

joshheitzman 10 hours ago

It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture.

linuxhansl 3 hours ago

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.

MyHonestOpinon 3 hours ago

> 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.

This is so true. We have figured out how to use an endless list of software tools. Hardly anyone is as prepared to use the new tools as software engineers.

newsomix9xl 11 hours ago

The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful.

Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture.

Now what?

AnimalMuppet 10 hours ago

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!)

newsomix9xl 9 hours ago

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?

AnimalMuppet 7 hours ago

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.

bloodyplonker22 7 hours ago

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.

esseph 6 hours ago

It's still around and in use a lot of places, but that means you actually have to have an engineering culture at the company and less of an entrenched MBA type.

https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/

shimman 6 hours ago

Argue the need to implement workplace democracy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

The idea that we shouldn't be able to vote for our bosses is completely ridiculous. If we had truly collaborative workplaces it would probably unlikely another $50 trillion worth of value once you give workers the ability to exercise their voice (passionate workers want stable working environments, if executives are never held accountable by their subordinates how can we argue such an unfree system is worth preserving?).

dolni 6 hours ago

As a worker, you can exercise your voice... by getting another job. That is your vote.

The power of your vote is proportional to the value you bring.

A while back I threatened to quit because I had a team dynamic that was untenable. I made a management change mandatory.

I got a new boss. The old boss was later terminated.

tikhonj 5 hours ago

You can also exercise your voice by... talking. That might mean trying to convince leadership, it might mean trying to coordinate a bunch of people who agree with you but don't want to act on their own, or, who knows, it might mean something else. But there are quite a lot of things you can do that are short of threatening to quit or simply leaving.

(And sometimes just leaving really is the best step!)

sph87 3 hours ago

I would argue that’s an asymmetric game. If your boss’s boss or higher already dislikes your boss, then convincing leadership would be easy. But bad bosses don’t become the big bad boss by winning over their subordinates. They spend more time with their own boss than you do, your boss is likely going to have a better relationship with their own boss than you do, simply by proximity. Assuming they aren’t just a flat asshole of course.

A vote would in turn provide a mechanism to prevent such abuse. The boss works for the people not for their boss. Likewise the boss is no longer bound to the whims of their own boss. Their boss is the people below them. A group they will inevitably rejoin with new found appreciation for the troubles of management.

ElProlactin 5 hours ago

> 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.

Kinrany 2 hours ago

You're listing examples where there is no market

ElProlactin 17 minutes ago

Correction: I'm listing examples where "the market" doesn't function like an ideal, healthy market.

Search, social media, key SaaS markets, healthcare, insurance, etc.

yangcheng 2 hours ago

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

rawgabbit 9 hours ago

AI style writing; didn’t bother.

chanux 3 hours ago

Does culture eat strategy for breakfast?

conartist6 2 hours ago

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

bitwize 8 hours ago

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

jesse_dot_id 7 hours ago

My company has a great culture and also AI.

lilerjee 10 hours ago

How to develop good culture? Firstly remove AI.

syngrog66 3 hours ago

smart experienced people, unencumbered

cyanydeez 11 hours ago

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

sublinear 11 hours ago

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.

justincormack 11 hours ago

No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.

sublinear 10 hours ago

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.

derektank 9 hours ago

> 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.

esseph 6 hours ago

> Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.

Wrong.

You can dig a tunnel that fills in and kills you.

You can drive in a huge circle to get not the house next door.

You can kick out 1M lines of code a day that you don't understand and can't read.

It's only productive if the work produces value.

derektank 6 hours ago

To extend these metaphors, AI is adding supports to your tunnel, nudging your steering wheel to keep you going straight, and ensuring that the code you produce doesn't have vulns.

charlieyu1 10 hours ago

I’m old enough to remember computers replacing thousands of pages of paper.

revetkn 10 hours 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.

RugnirViking 8 hours ago

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

r_lee 10 hours ago

this is just false...

kaffekaka 9 hours ago

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.