Ask HN: Work Culture Canary?
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?
103 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadEasy joke based on my skin color :P
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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)
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.
It makes sense because not everyone does it.
Maybe this is the solution to the empty office space problem?
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.
Edit: Typo
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.
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.
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.
The problem is the "some pigs are more equal than others".
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.
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.
I don't see how planning work for a "C++ resource" helps other than faking it over and over again.
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).
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".
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"?
This was never forgotten and marked the beginning of a major engineering exodus.
By the way, I've noticed that people in both Kauai and Cyprus were super chill and honest, probably not a coincidence.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
What are lunches and gyms and all kinds of dumb peanuts in contrast to health care and stability.
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.
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.