Culture, in my opinion, is the sum of all behaviors in an organization. Behaviors are driven by incentives and disincentives. When we talk about culture we talk about the behaviors that are generally incentivized and disincentivized. Core values are a way to quickly distill and define the culture of an organization in such a way that it can be discussed and broadly understood.
I've also heard it said that culture is what you let people get away with.
What actually makes people hate their jobs over time?
This varies widely from person to person.
Someone else in this thread said that a job where they were working 10 hours a day, doing the job of 3 people with missed paychecks would be a cultural no-go for them. For others, the opportunity to learn new things by doing the job of 3 people is a dream. But for most, missed paychecks would be terrible!
I generally believe that (with a few extreme exceptions) that there are not "bad" and "good" cultures. There are just cultures that we do or do not want to be a part of.
The other thing to remember is that people change. A "good" culture for you today is not necessarily going to be a "good" culture for you in 5 years.
I can tell you one culture that is always bad. A company owned by private equity where they aren’t interested in increasing profits by increasing revenues. But where they are interested in “finding efficiencies” and acquiring other companies to combine them and exit - either by going public or getting sold.
Yeah I disagree. I don’t have enough info to say that’s “bad.” Sounds like they’re not raising prices for the end consumer? What’s wrong with finding efficiencies? Is it more moral to let a company be inefficient? What’s wrong with buying and selling companies to make money?
See what happens when PE firms take over services like vets, doctors offices, home healthcare, senior care facilities or other essential services.
They also do things like if a restaurant chain owns the building and the land, they split them into separate businesses, sell off the company that owns the land and increase the rent making the restaurant itself unsustainable.
Then you have leverage buyouts where the PE firm loads the company with debt to make money for themselves and let the company rot.
This is a different strategy than VCs like YC, they invest money because they want the company to grow. As an employee, a PE firm isn’t going to pay employees of the company it owns well or give good benefits.
Now outside consultants who are hired by the PE firms can make good money. I was first exposed to (in hindsight bad) cloud consultants as a dev lead who didn’t know AWS at the time. I saw what they were making and worked on pivoting to cloud consulting focused on app dev “application modernization” shortly after that.
I’ve been in cloud consulting since mid 2020 and recently I have worked on one project for a PE backed company
Comments
Culture, in my opinion, is the sum of all behaviors in an organization. Behaviors are driven by incentives and disincentives. When we talk about culture we talk about the behaviors that are generally incentivized and disincentivized. Core values are a way to quickly distill and define the culture of an organization in such a way that it can be discussed and broadly understood.
I've also heard it said that culture is what you let people get away with.
This varies widely from person to person.
Someone else in this thread said that a job where they were working 10 hours a day, doing the job of 3 people with missed paychecks would be a cultural no-go for them. For others, the opportunity to learn new things by doing the job of 3 people is a dream. But for most, missed paychecks would be terrible!
I generally believe that (with a few extreme exceptions) that there are not "bad" and "good" cultures. There are just cultures that we do or do not want to be a part of.
The other thing to remember is that people change. A "good" culture for you today is not necessarily going to be a "good" culture for you in 5 years.
I can tell you one culture that is always bad. A company owned by private equity where they aren’t interested in increasing profits by increasing revenues. But where they are interested in “finding efficiencies” and acquiring other companies to combine them and exit - either by going public or getting sold.
Yeah I disagree. I don’t have enough info to say that’s “bad.” Sounds like they’re not raising prices for the end consumer? What’s wrong with finding efficiencies? Is it more moral to let a company be inefficient? What’s wrong with buying and selling companies to make money?
See what happens when PE firms take over services like vets, doctors offices, home healthcare, senior care facilities or other essential services.
They also do things like if a restaurant chain owns the building and the land, they split them into separate businesses, sell off the company that owns the land and increase the rent making the restaurant itself unsustainable.
Then you have leverage buyouts where the PE firm loads the company with debt to make money for themselves and let the company rot.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-11/simon-schus...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/private-equity-rol...
https://prospect.org/2018/10/16/vulture-capitalism-killed-se...
This is a different strategy than VCs like YC, they invest money because they want the company to grow. As an employee, a PE firm isn’t going to pay employees of the company it owns well or give good benefits.
Now outside consultants who are hired by the PE firms can make good money. I was first exposed to (in hindsight bad) cloud consultants as a dev lead who didn’t know AWS at the time. I saw what they were making and worked on pivoting to cloud consulting focused on app dev “application modernization” shortly after that.
I’ve been in cloud consulting since mid 2020 and recently I have worked on one project for a PE backed company