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Ask HN: Work Culture Canary?
68 points by dusted on Sept 7, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 101 comments
On our fridge, 7 years ago, I put a poster: Anarchy soda! Fizzy drinks, for the people, by the people, take one, leave some.

I didn't set this up with any other intent that having some soda available to myself, but I've come to think of it as my canary.. The fridge pretty much never runs dry, to the astonishment of many a visitor. It indicates to me, that the culture is sound, that people are conscientious and respecting of one another. If it stops working, it flags to me that we either have a bad apple, or that it's time to start looking.

It's also awesome to always have access to fizzy drinks :)

Anything similar where you work? A thing that intentionally or not, indicates to you that you're surrounded by reasonable people?




The difference between plebs' and bosses' seating arrangements.

If plebs get second hand, barely functional chairs/desks, hand-me-downs as computing equipment and insufficient lighting while bosses get a corner office and a $10K desk, it's pretty clear who they value and who they don't, which normally also extend to how seriously the plebs' opinions/suggestions are taken.


Once in a company we moved and people found out it would be open office layouts - coming from team offices. My boss took a lot of effort to explain how nice open office is, how productivity will benefit, and better working together. When we moved we found out he had his own office


Yeah, the problem isn't necessarily the open plan. Those work if you design them well, but most companies don't, aiming for "urban chic" rather than "this is a place for people to get stuff done".

The problem is the "some pigs are more equal than others".


The team eagerly wanted to redecorate, I "allowed" (for those who felt they needed this) the team to redecorate and move their desks how they saw the best layout. Boy did I get into trouble with the designer and corporate policy, because the desks in the whole enterprise were layouted in that (for developers bad) way (long rows). I threatened to leave and the team got their layout (4 desk islands, lots of moveable whiteboards, plants and dividers).


Corner offices are where individual motivations go to die.


Every time I take a can of soda from the fridge, I replace it with two. I exhort my colleagues to do the same. However we have yet to reach my goal of 2^64 cans which makes me suspect there are some bad apples.


Self sacrifice by emptying the fridge of soda might be someone who cares deeply about his colleagues' health.


And who believes that his colleagues’ health is their responsibility to the point of trying to change the culture.


I think you need to replace it with more than two if you want to achieve 2^64, probably, at least, replace it with "as many as are left + 1" each time, then start with 3 and you'll have a chance :D but you'll run outta cash first I'm afraid xD


I don't get it. Although it may seems like it is an exponential process, when following this rule, the number of cans currently in the fridge is just the total number ever consumed. This process is limited by people soda consumption.


*twice the total consumed. If you count up all cans at the start of the day, and if you drink them all, then at the end of the day, you have 2x. If you start with one, then after a year you have 2^364.


If you start with k cans in the fridge, you take one there is now k-1 cans in the fridge, you add back two, according to the rule, there are now k+1 can in the fridge.

You and your colleagues repeat this process n times, n being the number of total cans drank. At the end of the repeating n times there are k+n cans in the fridge, and n cans in the garbage bin.


If you look at it that way, then the daily growth is only linear when the daily n is constant. When the daily n = number of cans to start with that day, then the daily growth is 2^n.


That doesn't make sense, if everyone done it you would run out of fridge capacity within few hours, why not take one, replace one?


“Whoever fills the fridge needs to buy a new fridge”


> That doesn't make sense, if everyone done it you would run out of fridge capacity within few hours, why not take one, replace one?

It makes sense because not everyone does it.


I think it was unspoken in the GP's comment that you would have to acquire an exponential number of fridges too.

Maybe this is the solution to the empty office space problem?


Maybe this is why Amazon recommends refrigerators for like six months after you buy one.


I think the general idea is that you should contribute twice the drinks you consume because not everyone will always play by the rules and this will not necessarily be a bad apple. I can easily imagine myself drinking from that fridge for days, then one day bring back three 6-packs into the fridge because I saw an offer and carrying them to work would not be an issue because "I'll go with my car next week". Something alike :)


My happiness in a job is inversely proportional to the diligence with which they track time and estimations.


How about tracking your time in increments of 6 minutes?

Also, their system doesn't know what minutes are. You have to convert to decimal hours on the fly.

BUT WAIT THERES MORE

Every six minutes, also need to know which 30 character charge code you were working on.

Also also the 15 character Work Breakdown Structure number (Sending Email, Review Process, etc). Which changes by Project.

Also also also the 24 character project number.

All of these. EVERY SIX MINUTES. OR YOU ARE FIRED. Single mistake, KICK. Here's your box. Goodbye.

Keep in mind this is all for salaried staff. And. AND!!!! You can only charge a maximum of 1.7% hours on overhead tasks. Overhead tasks like . . liiiiiiikkkkeee . . DOING YOUR TIMECARD.

Over the decades they've gotten really good at staffing with people who are good at timecards and/or who lie a lot.

(I've moved on, thanks for asking, but it took me far too long)


My sympathies! Legal is definitely not for me.


Oh man, I wish it was legal.

Nah, this is defense. Now, it's normal to have this sort of charge structure, but not for everyone in the entire company. That was the canary, I guess, but I lost track of all the various red flags . . alarmingly quickly. It's like the contractor didn't have its own policies, then they got a contract, and just applied whatever was in their first contract as their generic process.

Bargain basement staff, makes it even more absurd that they're tracking six minute increments for everyone. As if the salaried nature of the workforce didn't do that already.

Case studies in "why you don't let customers set business process", because then you have dozens of businesses inside your business.


Government contracting. I worked for a Non-profit that was just as crazy with timekeeping. All of that detail went into generating the billing statement. The different activities were subject to different base rates as well as different overhead rates, depending what was negotiated in the contract with which ever agency we were dealing with.


It is a massive drain on morale. Billable hours sure, but tracking non-billable hours is just making management's job my job. I the impact it has is regularly underestimated.


Very hard to know if you've missed logging some billable time if your work day isn't in the time tracking system. We hemorrhaged billable hours when I said ppl didn't have to log non-billable time.

You'd end up with a 2.5h block and it was unclear if that was 2.5h of internal meetings and email and whatnot, or 1h of forgot-to-time billable and 1.5h of genuinely unbillable.

It's a pain in the ass but people are fallible and this catches those falls.


Admittedly I've lived exactly what you're saying, I do get it. But I'd love to explore less impactful alternatives. It depends a lot on the companies attitude towards it, and how it's implemented too. If the process of tracking time is too complicated, with too many layers of management wrapped up in the tracking process, you have a brand new overhead, and it's saddled with stress and miscommunication. Tracking non-billable hours can at least be done in a reasonable way, and maybe you're doing that .

You can see the difference between asking someone to track "Meetings" as a line item, and asking them to track "Meetings for client X to job number 22324, wait no, that was last months, the new job number is 22342, and it's not billable this month, but next month it's billable again, I'm not the PM for next month so you'll have to chase up the job number with the new PM..."


I want to know unbillable time, because coordination overhead and other crap can grow and eat into productive time.

We put in sprints and standups (in a small co, With 2n projects) at one point, and tracking made us realize that this ceremony was costing us 15% of our time and maybe giving us 1% utility.


I hope I'm not being too short, but why did it take atomic tracking from all your employees to figure that out? You should have known that when you implemented sprints and standups.

I guess that's what I mean by making it my job. It shouldn't be too difficult in small companies to keep track of how much impact unbillable process has. Attend a standup, how long did it take? Probably takes about that long every time, do some quick math. Ask your developers, do they feel it's worthwhile? No? Scrap it, make it shorter.

I can appreciate the impact of unbillable hours on the bottom line, and the impact of uncaught billable hours as well. But surely a PM can manage that without having to track every minute of the day? Set a guideline for billable hours per week, try to enable people to meet it. Be supportive rather than punitive.


At the time, I was a worker bee. Small dev staff (2 or 3, with 5-10 projects, so 1 person per project), Small company. CEO/Founder was the boss, and direct manager of everyone. I was 3/5 time, and only 2 days a week in the office, with others in and out of the office as well.

So we do this thing, and the dev team impression is that it's taking a lot of time, but it was good because it was a way for micromanaging in bulk. But then we turn around and add up the time and it was a concrete way to say "This is taking too much time" without coming out and saying: "This is crap".


Fair enough, as always real life is more nuanced than internet discussions. I know we do the things we do for good reasons, and with the best information we can get.


I need a task list, I need to prioritise, so I publish that list on a wiki along with done/blocked/remarks. Each task ~1 day

Once this is done (with a few blocked items that are manglement responsibility) I never get asked for estimates, or worse, Jira issues.

It's not unreasonable that management want to know what you are doing and how long it will take. Make that easy for them in a way that suits you, and it stops being a burden.


If you can get away with just that, it is definitely the happier end of the spectrum.

Most organisations have a tao and it’s fit in or fuck off. So if they use Jira then so do the staff. And being scolded for a ticket status not being updated can be a thing.


In a small growing company, when someone starts leaving the toilets in a mess, there is a bad hire. Knowing you work with at least one uncivilized person changes the feel of the company.


Had the same issue when I hired a software developer intern to train. I didn't wait one extra minute to tell them about the issue after I saw the bathroom, and discussed with them why this was not acceptable at all. They kinda changed their habit, but I eventually let them go due to incompetency reasons.

Edit: Typo


Same for piling dirty dishes in the sink.


I've always been one for doing dishes. BUT, a cleaner can usually be hired for minimum/living wage. An extra couple hours of the cleaners time so everyone comes in to a clean office strikes me as likely being worth it in the long run.


Dishes are usually the responsibility of the eater where I've worked. All offices have cleaners, but their responsibility should be getting rid of dust and such, not the sink.

Besides, the cleaners are usually there on a schedule, and I think it says something about someone's ego if they can't take half a minute to wash a cup of coffee. It's not like we're deep frying things in the pantry.


What about when you sit on the toilet and look at the stall door, then see a bunch of buggers stuck on the door?


Then you need to ask the principal if you can now please use the teachers toilets.. Or start teaching the kids not to be gross little bastards, but that's probably a lost cause ;)


A classic on this topic: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...


Kinda weird but I noticed we were happy to be paid in soda for extra work. Sometimes someone does a night shift, they take a Mountain Dew and don't replace it.

It's not at all a fair trade, but it's satisfying to be at the keyboard with an unhealthy drink. You're not supposed to be working at nights, either. It's just what hacker culture feels like - rebelling against the best practices for some hint of productivity.

Someone who charges for sodas doesn't get it.


Was just about to post this.


Mine is when human beings working at the company start becoming referred to as “resources” instead of people.


Once a CEO giving a tour of the engineering department to a potential investor and loudly described us as the monkeys that hammer out code for him.

This was never forgotten and marked the beginning of a major engineering exodus.


Oook. I consider myself to be a code monkey and divide the jobs I'm given in to one, two or three banana jobs. (indicating complexity)


Counterpoint: I've seen this go okay when it's to make things impersonal. Rather than saying the engineering team is slow, we just say there's not enough resources in engineering. Rather than saying Diane is being stretched out across too many teams, we say we need more resources in design.


I am starting a new forum ResourceNews where resources can gather around and discuss anything that irks them in their workplace.


You can do both: "resources" and "people" are two different point of views of the same thing. I’m in a 5-person company and we refer to people as "resources" when we’re allocating times to each project. We refer to people as "people" outside of that.


You can certainly do both, but you shouldn't.

People are not resources: each one of them will do different work and different amount of work. They are never interchangeable, and they don't even behave the same over time. A frustrated or bored "resource" will do lesser work, but as long as you refer to them as a resource, you'll miss on that nuance.

It's not that hard to consider them people, possibly even people by names in such a small company as yours.


> People are not resources: each one of them will do different work and different amount of work.

Different people have different resources, when you allocate a resource, you're allocating something someone can do, not something they can't do.. When you put resources on a project, the people follow along, since they're the ones with the resource in demand.

I've never understood the resource as referring to a person, but rather, to the work that is expected that the person can do.

If you need a C++ resource, you pick a person that can do C++, they may also be able to do PHP and SQL, but in this case, that's not what you're selecting for.


Even then, your "C++ resource" will perform completely differently based on the person they are: eg. a junior C++ engineer will be slower than a mid/senior engineer, and an engineer providing a more maintainable solution might be slower too (and somebody un/familiar with the problem domain or API in use).

I don't see how planning work for a "C++ resource" helps other than faking it over and over again.


In my specific case we all have roughly the same experience with each technology so it’s fine to consider people as interchangeable. Of course that doesn’t mean we don’t take preferences into account; it’s just to have a rough idea of our roadmap and know if we need to recruit.


I agree.

Also, if people are so uniquely skilled that each and every task can only be made by a specific person (excuse me, "human being") then your bus-factor is 1 and a single person leaving, getting sick (or indeed, hit by a bus) means death for the project.. That's terrible.

It's entirely reasonable to think of work and people using separate terms, I'd argue it's probably healthy too.. Now, that's not the same as ignoring personal preferences where they apply, for instance, when allocating resources to a task or project, of course, consideration should be taken when possible, "oh, person X hates doing this, but Y loves it, sure, X is slightly stronger at it, but we let Y do it, then they're happier and Y gets stronger too"

I consider myself as being around a 1.3x javascript resource for backend, a 0.8x for frontend, and around a 0.5x resource for C++ (meaning I'll spend twice the amount of time doing the same task as someone I consider a 1x C++ resource).


> uniquely skilled

I was mostly referring to how we all have different levels of expertise in some narrower domains. Just like your example of you being 1.3x at JS and 0.5x for C++: you can do C++ on a project, but you can't allocate two weeks on the C++ part of the project without deciding if it's you or 1.5x person doing the work. IOW, your roadmap is "faked".


Certainly, it's entirely possible you have people who can do roughly the same type of work.

You still don't benefit at all from calling them "resources" — at best, nobody minds, until you hire someone who does :) I mean, this is not even a nerdy or funny name that only certain people would enjoy, so why not simply stick with "people"?


Human capital


In a similar vein I visited Cyprus some years ago. In the middle of nowhere was a shaded spot with a few tables, a fridge and a plastic tub. You took a beer out of the fridge and put the money in the tub. That was how it worked.


I lived in a city where Little Free Library system worked really well. There were library boxes all over the city. You take a book and you leave a book. Or bring it back next time. Or put it in the different box. There were people who scavanged those libraries for books they could sell, but overall the system worked well. There was always something random to take and read, something you'd normally not read, but because it was there and it was free I read many books I otherwise wouldn't have.


Quite a lot of the old red phone boxes in the UK have been turned into these. They work great. We have one in our nearest park.


There are a few of those in Oslo as well!


There are plenty of those around Versailles. They are always full, I had a hard time stuffing books there when I had spare ones.


I just moved to New England. There are firewood, egg and produce stands everywhere like that. When my new flock of chicks is laying, we'll probably do the same (we don't eat the eggs or the chickens, we just like the pets). Part of our property is a blueberry field and our neighbor is going to let us run a upick through their property, since it's closer to our field than our house is. I love communities like this.


Good find, enjoy the community and the overall experience.


There are fruit stands that operate like this in Kauai, Hawaii. Seems like an excellent indicator of a hippie-like culture :)

By the way, I've noticed that people in both Kauai and Cyprus were super chill and honest, probably not a coincidence.


How jokes are reacted to. Jokes can be unfunny or tasteless, but when someone argues big concepts that a joke must not be made, its a big red flag.


At an old office we had a bit of a meme around yomamma jokes.

They were always nonsensical and certainly not graphic or directed at any actual mothers but one person randomly got super mad about it and complained to upper management and such jokes were explicitly banned on company property.

Then the nerf guns were banned.

Then all lights had to be on 100% migrane inducing brightness.

Then all desks had to be clean and free of any non-essential objects.

Most of engineering quit around that point.


Exactly.

The difference between a joke and bullying is that if it's a joke, the mark gets a laugh out of it as well.

Also that the honor of being the mark rotates around the group somewhat fairly. If you're either never the butt of the joke, or always the butt of the joke, you know that the people around you either don't respect or trust you.


> The difference between a joke and bullying is that if it's a joke, the mark gets a laugh out of it as well.

Not really. You never know if they genuinely laugh or if it’s a way to attenuate the group pressure they’re the victime of.


When I -stop- finding silly things to make fun of people for, then they know I am actually upset at them.


And conversely when someone argues big concepts ("freedom of speech", etc) to continue making tasteless jokes that people don’t enjoy.


All within reason, I assume? Or would you be OK with jokes about skin color and such? I'm not humoring you, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.


> would you be OK with jokes about skin color and such?

No, I'd never take the piss like that..... not even out of gingers.

(BTW: Quality piss taking is expected in the UK, to the extent a US HR department would probably have a fit, and probably the moderators of this US dominated forum for the above joke!)


>Or would you be OK with jokes about skin color

I would, although as with everything it's context dependent. My boss is African and has on more than one occasion got my name mixed up with another colleague (we're white). In a meeting he did it again, realised his mistake and was on the verge of saying something but caught himself. I offered in mock outrage - "Well, all white people look alike - is that it?" to which he burst out laughing as that was exactly what he was going to say. But that kind of humour (whether it's funny or not) is not at anyone's expense. It also took place between colleagues who have worked together for years now and in a setting we're reasonably sure no-one is going to take offence.


You can make sexist or racist jokes as you want if you are the butt of the joke yourself. It still makes other people laugh.


If we can agree on 'knowing the difference between jokes and harrassment / mobbing' then I'm with you on this. It's all about context. 'Just a prank / joke' is too often an excuse for things that are actually worse.


the problem with that is lack of culture in the recipient, for example most of my peers would be very confused with the W word, ie. "Whitey" from Giles Scott Heron's "Whitey on the noon"...


"I don't need sunscreen, I'm so pale I just reflect the sun light"

Easy joke based on my skin color :P


This is for management culture: talk to your non-technical colleages (office manager, junior HR/admin etc) see how they are doing and how they are being treated.

To understand who someone is you need to see how they behave when they have nothing stopping them. Management will often have to treat engineering/specialist staff well because they have no choice, but they see support staff as more interchangeable and easier to replace. If they are being treated well, with respect etc, then that's because management have a good culture of valuing people.

How management treats people it doesn't have to treat well tells you have they would treat you if they could.

It's kind of the office version of the judging people based on how they treat waiting staff.


After getting an offer letter, ask if you can come over and have one last chat with the dev team. If the hiring manager says no, walk away.


https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Once they cut benefits that are widely lauded. Holiday-free PTO, exercise and health benefits, stuff that makes sense to anyone to attract talent when times are tough. You can cut corners, you can cut bonuses when times are tough - but you can't cut benefits. It's a short-term way of thinking, and you'll lose your best employees over it.


Why is this a red flag / canary? Given the chance, I'd take every single non-monetary benefit (such as "health benefit", or "exercise benefit") as direct monetary compensation added to my pay, by virtue of the fact I know much better how to allocate that money such that it is beneficial to me.


Two companies I worked at went to shit shortly after free lunches got the axe.


I feel the opposite way, it's not rational but when my work gives me all kinds of amenities like that, I feel like some sort of pet in a zoo.

What are lunches and gyms and all kinds of dumb peanuts in contrast to health care and stability.


When the leadership switches on "let us know what you think" to "your managers will chat to you and collect feedback". It's not always the case but often this is leadership putting up a barrier so they can more easily dismiss the feedback they know they're going to get.


This may be a bit of a different scale, but pay attention to how many lawyers are in the company. If the amount dramatically increases for some unknown reason, it's probably a good time to depart.


I left some famous startup, not because it reached 1000 employees, but because the motto changed from:

“Be the change you seek”

to

“We advance humanity”.

With a little legless girl from Africa, for whom we build the software that helps the doctor that helps the girl.

I still have the poster hanging behind me as a CEO. To remind people of what not to become. We’re just making fucking software, don’t stay late, go take care of your family, they’re the most important thing in your life.


I worked in healthcare robotics for a spell. The management fell 50/50 into these buckets. More than once I had to remind some self-important person that we, in fact, did not "save lives" and that that was firmly the business of medical practitioners.

The first time it happened to me, I thought it was a joke. A manager wanted my help to debug some non-critical issue with one of the devices in the field and I told him multiple times that I had a hard stop at like 4PM for a dentist appointment. As it was getting close to the time I had to go, I kept reminding him and he wouldn't acknowledge me. I finally stood up and said I had to go and he responded, "Fine, go. It's not like we're saving lives around here." If I had been more confident in myself and my skills I'd have quit on the spot. Instead I just made some comment about how I'd help him the following morning and left.

I committed to myself to not let anyone get away with it again, though, and thankfully my manager, who was engineer #1 in this org and at the time was an engineering director, felt the same and had the political capital to call people out for it after hearing story.


To be honest, helping doctors in Africa is one of the few things I'd gladly label as advancing humanity.


Yes, but we’re only making software for them.


I've always genuinely been baffled by how Theranos was able to hire all those security guards and making everyone that left the company sign an NDA.


If the NDA was covering things beyond the legal requirements (you cannot tell about company secrets one tout leave, au least where I live) and you got extra money for that, why not?


How they treat office work (first or second class)


If its hard to find out the owner of the company, cause everyone could be it.

People who are self-secure, are empowered to solve problems on there own, do not get bogged down in useless hierarchys, can be easily mistaken for the boss of the shop.


This isn't quite the same thing as a "work culture canary", but it offered an interesting (to me, at least) perspective on coworkers.

On two occasions, once in a large media office in the UK for a year and the second time in another large media office in Australia for two-and-a-half years, I maintained a huge stash of chocolate bars in the drawers at my workstation. In the UK, I'd leave the drawer open to display the wares; Twix, Milky Way, Flake, Rolos etc, and also bars of slightly better chocolate - Toblerone, Green & Black's etc.

People would drop by for a chat, take what they wanted and go on their way. Quite a few would cut the chat, grab a bar and leave with a grin or a thumbs-up or similar. I liked it that they cut to the chase; didn't feel awkward about taking what was freely offered without feeling obliged, for weird social/politeness reasons, to make smalltalk.

At the time, we'd had a bunch of teenagers working to sort out, manually, a huge mess with a football (i.e. soccer) score/results feed, which was spewing all sorts of rogue data. The teenagers were all keen followers of the sport and could spot errors reliably. One was my nephew, a law student, one was a friend's son, an English Lit student, and the other two were sons of a colleague, one an economics student and his brother in his final year of school. This crew were stationed all around my workstation. They were really observant.

It surprised me to find out that some colleagues would avail themselves of the chocolate drawer only when I wasn't at my desk (too many meetings, so for at least an hour during the working day). Others, I was told, whose regular choices would be Twix, Rolos or similar, would, if I were absent, hit the better stuff instead. My young observers had great fun with this people-watching stuff, and it amused me greatly.

In Australia, I kept drawers stocked with standard bags of fun-size Mars, Twix, Milky Way, Flake etc, and higher-quality bars from Haigh's and Koko Black. Every day I'd fill bowls with these and leave them on a shelf in front of my desk. Although I lacked my teen crew, I found willing observers among the devs in our corner of the office - we were working on a newsroom system and doing so in the newsroom itself, so lots of journalists and ad people were our neighbours; which was a similar mix to that in the UK.

Similar patterns emerged. Some people took chocolates only when I wasn't present, and others changed their preferences based on my presence/absence.

It'd never pass muster as a proper experiment, but my biggest take-home was that "my sort of person" was happy to grab and run without chitchat, always took whatever they fancied, and never altered their habits depending on whether or not I was around. Also, and this was the same in the UK and in Australia, the "grab-grin-and-run" folks were the only ones who would, every now and then, add a pile of chocolate themselves.

Another takeout, again, it's nothing but anecdotal, was that advertising people took the free stuff only when I wasn't around, in the UK and in Australia.

Anyhow, chocolate is quite cheap and my supplies probably cost £20 to £30 a week at the time (say 10 or 12 years ago). But it's fun seeing how people react to something as trivial as free chocolate, and how it provides behavioural/social insights.


This is a great story and interesting set of observations. Thanks for taking the time to share!


I really liked this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL2WDcNu_3A about culture and how to change it. The fun enjoyable nonseriousness aspect of it seen in your example applies to their findings


Twenty or thirty years ago it was always a bad sign when someone is assigned to something with a name like "Special Projects". It meant the company didn't know what to do with you, but didn't want to fire/layoff just yet.


Looooooots of red flags for my current employer, when I see your canaries posted here. :-D


When the security tickets are consistently ignored, it is time to bail.


Just left Twitter, ey?




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