>… when people say “culture,” what does that really mean?
I think of an organization's or a team's culture as the undocumented practices that the org or team all follow. Just to name a few…
1. Interpersonal interaction styles
2. Communication styles
3. What's incentivized
4. What behaviors are acceptable/unacceptable
…
You could have a "blame culture". Teams like that are incentivized to point the finger and look for convenient scapegoats.
You could have a culture that incentivizes "Psychological safety". Meaning people are allowed to speak up and disagree with stuff without fear of being fired.
You could have a "dysfunctional" culture. One example being where the norm is for individual members to convince other members that they are the smartest person in the room.
> What actually makes people hate their jobs over time? Is it pay/people/culture?
That's bound to be unique for each person. But it's not unreasonable to guess that _in general_ what ultimately makes people hate their job is…
• A person and their team value different things
An employee might place a high value on respectfulness. But a coworker can't even spell the word.
Another employee might consider software development as a "craft" and take pride in what they deliver. But the organization/team values "move fast and break things…tech debt be damned!" above everything else.
Pay - when I am not getting paid as much as I “should”. It’s all relative though. I don’t expect any company outside of BigTech to match BigTech comp (been there done that, not interested in going back).
Any job where I actually go into an office. But the company has to be “remote only”.
Autonomy - for the last decade I have mostly had complete autonomy on the “how” within very wide understandable guardrails when I led projects.
I don’t do side projects and never have during my 30 year career. So the company I work for has to be using marketable up to date tech.
Also I would hate to be on call.
I don’t care about the “mission”. It’s a paycheck.
Knowledge – Am I building skills or knowledge that have value outside this specific company (algorithms, math, systems design, etc.), or am I just learning a bunch of internal trivia that won’t matter anywhere else?
Benefits – Financial compensation and benefits can make up for a surprising amount of dissatisfaction.
People – Do I like the people I work and interact with? Do we get along and have anything in common?
Laudability – Is the work noble, meaningful, or interesting? Highly dependent on the individual. For me, it’s education; for others, it might be science, healthcare, yadda yadda yada.
I'm usually reasonably satisfied if a job meets two out of the four.
I have found that comp alone is not enough to make up for a miserable job. I hated every minute I worked at AWS to the point I couldn’t fake it and it was remote.
When I got Amazoned, one of my former coworkers was a director at a well known public non tech company and was going to create a position for me to be over their cloud migration and strategy. It was going to pay around $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs my last year at AWS. I really hate leading migrations and infrastructure projects. I specialize in cloud + app dev consulting even though it pays less outside of working at Amazon and Google.
Speaking of Google, I also have/had a better than even chance of working there (GCP consulting division) making close to six figures more than I make now. But I’m not even tempted between my hated for working at large companies and working in an office
I’m honestly not sure I could answer this one, I’ve never really worked at a company that pushed a unified culture. At most of the places I’ve worked, the teams were pretty siloed and insulated, so each team ended up having its own “culture.”
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.
You could have a culture that incentivizes "Psychological safety". Meaning people are allowed to speak up and disagree with stuff without fear of being fired.
You could have a "dysfunctional" culture. One example being where the norm is for individual members to convince other members that they are the smartest person in the room.
That's bound to be unique for each person. But it's not unreasonable to guess that _in general_ what ultimately makes people hate their job is… An employee might place a high value on respectfulness. But a coworker can't even spell the word.Another employee might consider software development as a "craft" and take pride in what they deliver. But the organization/team values "move fast and break things…tech debt be damned!" above everything else.
Pay - when I am not getting paid as much as I “should”. It’s all relative though. I don’t expect any company outside of BigTech to match BigTech comp (been there done that, not interested in going back).
Any job where I actually go into an office. But the company has to be “remote only”.
Autonomy - for the last decade I have mostly had complete autonomy on the “how” within very wide understandable guardrails when I led projects.
I don’t do side projects and never have during my 30 year career. So the company I work for has to be using marketable up to date tech.
Also I would hate to be on call.
I don’t care about the “mission”. It’s a paycheck.
I always break jobs down into four factors:
Knowledge – Am I building skills or knowledge that have value outside this specific company (algorithms, math, systems design, etc.), or am I just learning a bunch of internal trivia that won’t matter anywhere else?
Benefits – Financial compensation and benefits can make up for a surprising amount of dissatisfaction.
People – Do I like the people I work and interact with? Do we get along and have anything in common?
Laudability – Is the work noble, meaningful, or interesting? Highly dependent on the individual. For me, it’s education; for others, it might be science, healthcare, yadda yadda yada.
I'm usually reasonably satisfied if a job meets two out of the four.
I have found that comp alone is not enough to make up for a miserable job. I hated every minute I worked at AWS to the point I couldn’t fake it and it was remote.
When I got Amazoned, one of my former coworkers was a director at a well known public non tech company and was going to create a position for me to be over their cloud migration and strategy. It was going to pay around $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs my last year at AWS. I really hate leading migrations and infrastructure projects. I specialize in cloud + app dev consulting even though it pays less outside of working at Amazon and Google.
Speaking of Google, I also have/had a better than even chance of working there (GCP consulting division) making close to six figures more than I make now. But I’m not even tempted between my hated for working at large companies and working in an office
I agree
and company culture does that matter at all?
I’m honestly not sure I could answer this one, I’ve never really worked at a company that pushed a unified culture. At most of the places I’ve worked, the teams were pretty siloed and insulated, so each team ended up having its own “culture.”
A really bad colleague can make a job miserable. I slightly bad manager can also make it suck.
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.