
No Shenanigans - worldvoyageur
https://avc.com/2019/11/no-shenanigans/
======
codeulike
Company Values are generally a bunch of nice things and you look at them and
think well yes thats nice.

A more interesting question, I think, is what other Values (that didn't make
the list) the Company is prepared to let slide in order to achieve the
official ones that did make the list. If you are optimising for some specific
set of values, that must mean you are prepared to let other unnamed ones slide
a little.

e.g. to achieve 'Kindness' you might need to let 'Consistency' slide, and so
on.

So what Values is a company not prioritising? Thats a much more interesting
discussion.

edit: Lets have a worked example, make this a bit more concrete.

Lets say Organisation X is a community interest company and has the following
values:

* Leadership

* Excellence

* Collaboration

* Integrity

* Commitment

What a lovely bunch of values. Who wouldn't want to adopt those?

But whats more interesting to think about is "what are they prepared to
compromise to achieve those values?":

e.g. if Commitment is an important value, does that mean Flexibility is not
valued so much? Because surely if you are committed, you lose flexibility. Or
if Collaboration is an important value, does that mean 'Delivering things on
time' is less valued? Because collaborating with everybody takes time to
organise.

~~~
patjenk
If you're willing to let a value slide, its not a value. Values should be
things you're willing to stick to even when it hurts you. I think that
misunderstanding/lie is the problem with most "values" list.

~~~
nostrademons
But that's the point - where are you willing to be hurt? That's a more
interesting question than what you are ostensibly willing to stick to, and
much more revealing about the organization's culture. Everybody wants all the
nice things, but what really reveals your values is when you want two nice
things that are contradictory - which do you choose?

That's why Facebook's "Move fast and break things" is so powerful (and so
revealing) as a value statement, as it showed that Facebook was willing to
break any number of things to move fast. Google's "Don't be evil", as words,
is utterly useless, because nobody considers themselves evil. Google shutting
down their consumer-facing site so that they could honor the terms of their
AOL deal, however, spoke huge volumes, as did them pulling out of China in
2010 regardless of the cost to their market. Similarly, them going back _into_
China regardless of privacy and human rights violations also speaks volumes.

~~~
agnokapathetic
> Google shutting down their consumer-facing site so that they could honor the
> terms of their AOL deal

What was the story here? I'm not familiar with this and I can't seem to find
anything on Google about it :)

~~~
nostrademons
When they were young (2002) Google signed a contract with AOL to become the
default search provider there. When they flipped the switch, AOL gave them so
much traffic that they lacked server capacity to service all the requests.
Rather than renege on the contract, they shut down google.com and redirected
all hardware resources toward servicing the AOL traffic until they could build
more servers and make any necessary software optimizations.

The story was told to me as a Noogler (in 2009) as an example of Googliness,
and also as a significant milestone in the company's development. The backdrop
of this was the dot-com bust: web companies were failing left and right, and
nobody knew who would be left standing. By shutting off their own consumer
brand to honor the terms of the contract, Google made a name for themselves as
someone who would move hell or high water for their partners, which built
critical trust in what was then a promising but unproven startup.

------
brunoTbear
I worked at a startup that structured their values to be explicit tradeoffs
between two equally valid choices generally, but where one choice was more
valid for the startup.

For example, we held something to the effect of "We value open disagreement
and direct communication more than harmonious relations" This was a great
value: the company needed to have tight OODA loops and that did not permit
beating around the bush. People had differences of opinion and they needed to
be able to express them and come to conclusions. In other orgs it could have
been valid to have a get-along attitude if things were more important to keep
steady (a successful and functioning business unit, for example, might prefer
to keep going steadily without rocking the boat).

At the same time, the company also said "We value thinking things through from
first principles rather than re-applying what has already been done
elsewhere." This meant you couldn't justify a decision on "well we did it that
way at company x", you had to have a good reason to do something a certain
way. This cost us time (unlike the previous value) because decisions or
designs could be challenged for not having a good justification. The upside
was that it led (I think) to better designs, and encouraged people to debate
bad decisions before making them.

We didn't have any values that looked like "honesty" or "excellence". That was
nice.

------
Fellshard
This subject and the utter vagueness of the values presented here require me
to bring up Bryan Cantrill's talk, 'Principles of Technology Leadership'.[1]
He gives Amazon a lambasting over their core principles, and Uber even moreso.

It's both funny and sobering to examine how what seems like a useful and
valuable foundation ends up being flimsy and easy to ignore when made vague
enough.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc)

------
emptybits
I've always enjoyed the word _shenanigans_ yet I've never known where or how
it originated. Rabbit hole.

Merriam-Webster tells us: _The history of shenanigan is as tricky and
mischievous as its meaning. Etymologists have some theories about its origins,
but no one has been able to prove them. All we can say for certain is that the
earliest known use of the word in print appeared in the April 25, 1855, issue
of San Francisco 's Town Talk. Although the "underhanded trick" sense of the
word is oldest, the most common senses in use now are "tricky or questionable
practices" (as in "political shenanigans") and "high-spirited behavior" (as in
"youthful shenanigans")._[1]

First use in 1855. Cool. I wondered what that first context was. So I used the
site Chronicling America to find the April 25th, 1855 issue of Town Talk. But
along the way I found earlier uses in the August 18th, 1854 issue of the
Nevada Journal[2] and February 3rd, 1855 issue of the Sierra Citizen.[3]

I still don't have the definitive etymological answer but what the web allows
a layperson to usefully research in 2019 is astounding!

[1] [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/shenanigan](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/shenanigan)

[2]
[https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026884/1854-08-1...](https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026884/1854-08-18/ed-1/seq-1/)

[3]
[https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058097/1855-02-0...](https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058097/1855-02-03/ed-1/seq-3/#date1=1789&index=0&rows=20&words=Shenanigan&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1855&proxtext=shenanigans&y=12&x=17&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1)

------
dcu
The Twilio API includes a X-Shenanigans header on every request, always set to
"none", of course :)

> $ curl -I [https://api.twilio.com](https://api.twilio.com)

~~~
fb03
they even cared to use a proper X-<> "custom header", respecting the rfc heh.
Nice.

~~~
steveklabnik
That pattern was deprecated 7 years ago
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648)

------
lostdog
Values are levers for a group of concepts. You can hook that lever up to
teamwork or frugality or toe-stepping, and suddenly it's easier to inject
these concepts into any discussion throughout the company.

Of course, who gets to pull these levers and when is a completely separate
issue. As usual it's up to the leadership whether any values are used in a
healthy or unhealthy way. Does frugality apply when an employee wants an
ergonomic keyboard, or when a VIP flies business class? Does be-humble apply
when negotiating compensation or to the CEO's vision?

Amazon, for example, is famous for weaponizing frugality and disagree-and-
commit against lower level employees. At $OldJob I got to watch a director
pull the move-fast lever whenever his team wanted to ship, and the safety-
first lever for other teams.

Written values can't really be good vs bad. They are more like a tool, and
will be used for good or evil depending on who is operating them.

------
john-radio
> draw the owl

"The rest of the fucking owl" is a meme about laughably incomplete
instructions, in case you didn't catch the reference:
[https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1272765-how-to-draw-an-
owl](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1272765-how-to-draw-an-owl)

"Draw the owl" is a pretty ironic rule, because it's horribly incomplete
itself unless you're familiar with that particular meme.

I wonder how many people work at Twilio who have heard "draw the owl," and
know it has something to do with being consistent, but has no idea what it
means or why it seems to be clear to everyone else?

~~~
blahblahthrow
I work at a place that also has "draw the owl" as a kind of corporate culture
joke? It's funny at small scale when everything is uncertain, but when you
grow to a thousand employees it kind of turns into an embarrassment.

We have kind of moved away from it officially AFAICT so now it's more of an
inside joke that old-timers use to assert dominance

------
debt
I've always wondered: what's the purpose of company values?

I genuinely don't know.

~~~
flukus
It helps motivate people and make them feel like they're part of a mission
while forgetting that they're only there for the paycheck. Motivated employees
are great because the work longer and harder for less pay.

------
seph-reed
I'd really like to make a service that's like a fail-safe for company values.
Something like:

The CEO/management puts half (or more) of their salary into some account, and
at the end of every month the employees decide whether or not the company is
going by its values. If not, certain charities which represent those values
are given the money.

------
thinkingkong
Its usually a failing of the business to not communicate it better but values
are one of the inputs to create the culture you want at a company. The best
version of this Ive heard is that “culture is the right people living their
values”. Done well, it makes it easy for people to hold themselves and each
other accountable. It makes hiring easier, sets tone for communications,
branding, etc.

Its super important for it to be explicitly stated. The difference amongst
companies not explicitly stating their values and ones who “wander” is
documented.

------
josh33
Helped form these at my former company, so I'm biased. But the memorability
and thoughtful definitions really helped these stick (to this day):
[https://www.entrata.com/company/values](https://www.entrata.com/company/values)

------
callumprentice
Our company values are captured in our "Tao of Linden" \-
[https://www.lindenlab.com/about](https://www.lindenlab.com/about)

They've changed a bit in the 15 years I've been there but happy to say we
still try to live by them today.

------
jonahbenton
Remarkable that this druck is ranked on HN alongside news of Facebook's latest
garbage shenanigan but very successful ploy, and Strategery's analysis of
Google's latest garbage shenanigan yet very successful ploy.

------
lonelappde
aka "Don't Be Evil"

~~~
layoutIfNeeded
We all knew how that ended up..

~~~
drad
Its all about your perspective. If I bought 100k worth of $50 stock and it
went to $5000 per share and this company decided to come clean and admit their
devious (but not evil) plan and the stock went to $25/share I'd consider that
evil...not the $5000/share value they made off of selling 'ads'.

~~~
yowlingcat
Shouldn't their value have been "Get money" then? That seems to describe what
you're saying.

