
Programming Your Culture - agurkas
http://bhorowitz.com/2012/12/18/programming-your-culture/
======
Matt_Cutts
There's good stuff in this post, but I think a lot of a company's culture
surfaces at moments that are thrust on you when you least expect it.

At Google, I can think of a few points that influenced my perceptions:

\- the first DMCA request we got, from the Church of Scientology

\- the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough
server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic
from Netscape.

\- when the Department of Justice tried to subpoena two months worth of all
user queries

\- when John Battelle grilled Eric Schmidt on stage at a Web 2.0 conference
and Eric declared "We would never trap user data."

All of those situations were thrust on us from the outside, and someone had to
make a call. I think those kinds of decisions are critical culture-defining
moments.

The decisions a company makes when everything is fine--or when you have plenty
of time to plan--can set some of the company's culture. But to me, how your
organization responds to a crisis is one of the best indicators of its
culture.

~~~
halvsjur
> the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough
> server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic
> from Netscape.

What is this referring to?

~~~
rdl
Google started providing search results for the Netscape browser. Google
didn't have enough server capacity to provide fast search results for normal
www.google.com traffic and the new Netscape browser search traffic, so they
started dropping queries to www.google.com until they could increase
performance.

i.e. they put their customer, Netscape, ahead of their own website's
performance.

------
codinghorror
> we instituted a ruthlessly enforced $10/minute fine for being late to a
> meeting with an entrepreneur. So, you are on a really important call and
> will be 10 minutes late? No problem, just bring $100 to the meeting and pay
> your fine. When new employees come on, they find this shocking, which gives
> us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs.

Except.. this doesn't actually work.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-
le...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-
levitt.html?_r=0)

> The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten
> day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the
> fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the
> economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there
> were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the
> fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving
> more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee
> would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380.

> After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went ... up.
> Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the
> original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.

~~~
guiambros
Sure not. Unless the fine is high enough to _hurt_ financially the person that
is infringing the rules, it will have the opposite effect.

It'll allow a false sense of entitlement; _"I'm paying for it, so it's now ok
to arrive late to pick up my child. It's my right"_.

~~~
codinghorror
I'm pretty sure that $10/minute isn't hurting anyone working at a VC firm
enough to matter. Maybe $10k/minute?

A fine that _was_ high enough to cause financial harm would surely have other
unanticipated effects.

~~~
guiambros
The key point is to _cause pain_.

A fine high enough to hurt financially the person breaking the rules is one
option (that's what governments usually do). Other good option is public
embarrassment. I used the $1 fine for people late to meetings, but we also
counted the number of times each one was fined, so there was an extra
_incentive_ to avoid.

~~~
DanBC
Be careful the 'fine' (preventative) does not become a 'charge' (entitlement).

"I've paid my dollar, so what if I'm late?" (As mentioned in that pop-
economics book about the parents and the nursery.)

------
davros
_Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have
far reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock
value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it
always creates a conversation, it will change behavior._

Thought-provoking. In hindsight, many of the things I've done that have
impacted on culture have had this sort of 'shock value'. I'm currently working
on changing an established culture and a shock/conversation-creating
initiative is just what is needed to help the other processes along.

------
damncabbage
_... but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift
desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with
withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we
can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.”_

It's probably not a good idea to hold up the "cheap door desk" as a good
example; from what I've read it seems like it's turned into more of a cargo-
cult-of-frugality thing: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102401>

(From a much longer thread, back when Steve Yegge accidentally posted his, uh,
feelings about Amazon: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876> )

------
codeonfire
Some companies need to kill the college dorm culture they are trying to
emulate.

How about a culture that says 'I put college behind me and I'm worth a few
extra square feet and a place to hang a picture or two.' Where can I find that
culture?

------
freework
Culture just happens. If you go out of your way to foster some kind of fake
"culture" you're only doing your business a disservice. The company I worked
for with the best culture did nothing to try to create a "culture".

~~~
agurkas
Cultures don't just "happen". Culture is a deliberate act of founder
instilling company values in early employees, so the culture then scales from
there. Best cultures always feel natural, because founders and early employees
spend a boat load of time working on it and enforcing it. 15 years and 9
startups, I walk into the company and immediately can tell if I want to be
there. Companies without culture are usually those in a Fortune500 list -
numb, bland, like Hondas and Toyotas.

