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Xarn posted:I have yet to see a company that actually obeys its values apart from "make all the money, lol". 
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Feb 16, 2022 15:50
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Previous job, one of their values was "best ideas win". I never saw it come up in a context other than "my idea is best and I have rank on you so gently caress off". Those people got real fuckin mad when you pointed out all the holes in their nightmare concept and asked them to do the same to yours. They were very "in it together". Their third one was "users first" which they genuinely meant to use well. As in, "let's stop loving up releases so bad we lose all our users". But they never followed through on an RCA of why they keep releasing garbage instead focusing on patching side effects. All in all one of the more sane organizations I've worked for. The consistent framing for when and how someone was being irrational was very useful.
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Feb 16, 2022 16:24
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I work for startups and they are big on the culture thing, but it's obvious that it becomes less of a focus as the company grows. But still, we process frickin' utility pole data, let's not pretend that what we do is profoundly life-changing to everyone who works for the company.
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Feb 16, 2022 16:40
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Protocol7 posted:I work for startups and they are big on the culture thing, but it's obvious that it becomes less of a focus as the company grows. But still, we process frickin' utility pole data, let's not pretend that what we do is profoundly life-changing to everyone who works for the company. Doesn't sound like you've embodied our core values of "Compassion" "Drive" and "Vision". Sorry, you will only receive a 1.5% raise this year. Better luck next time.
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Feb 16, 2022 16:42
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I used to work for this really cool small agency. I worked there for over a decade. Just super scrappy, very little hierarchy, the only non-designer or developer was one accounts person. Then over time we started growing, and added more managers and sales people. We moved to a bigger office with all the exposed brick and restored hardwood and glass box meeting rooms. We started having values written on our chalkboard wall and doing big brainstorm meetings and team building exercises and so on. And then we stopped being able to make enough money because all that fart huffing and presentation costs money and we couldn't keep our prices competitive while covering our overhead. So we got absorbed into some Wordpress SEO cubicle farm company and all the original designers and developers left within about a year, presumably to go work for companies where people spend their time actually producing work instead of just talking endlessly about big picture work-producing concepts. It was really sad. I worked at this company for over a decade and I'm still close with a lot of people from there. It's made me really hesitant to want to work anywhere with more than about 10 employees.
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Feb 16, 2022 18:06
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A little while ago our CTO announced that our goal should be to spend 75% of our time on “value producing activities”. Since this is utterly meaningless we then had hours of subsequent meetings about what “value producing” means (nothing), how they planned to measure it (they don’t), how the number was decided on (sounds good), and what happens if we meet the goal (nothing). This was done with zero irony. I think a big company would be capable of working just as well as a small company if they hired one guy to press a bullshit alarm in every meeting which releases the devs back to work
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Feb 16, 2022 18:18
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:A little while ago our CTO announced that our goal should be to spend 75% of our time on “value producing activities”. Since this is utterly meaningless we then had hours of subsequent meetings about what “value producing” means (nothing), how they planned to measure it (they don’t), how the number was decided on (sounds good), and what happens if we meet the goal (nothing). This was done with zero irony. I think a big company would be capable of working just as well as a small company if they hired one guy to press a bullshit alarm in every meeting which releases the devs back to work That sounds like a great idea. Put together a proposal for what it should sound like, who should have authorization for it's use, and what situations would warrant it's use. We'll review it at the next leadership meeting and see what sort of allocation we have to put towards it.
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Feb 16, 2022 19:16
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prom candy posted:Good save! I don't want to work for companies that are paying people to sit around and come up with that dumb bullshit instead of working I understand your point of view, but I've definitely seen and worked for companies where the existing culture was or rapidly became a threat to the business, more so than the more traditional threats such as failing to deliver on time, failing to make sales targets, exponential operations costs, etc. People like being acknowledged as human beings rather than interchangeable cogs in a corporate machine, and companies like to extract value from their cost centres. Demotivated, demoralised and disengaged staff are a cost centre, so extracting more ongoing value from them by inventing some nebulous "values" then making people sit in a circle and talk about company culture once every month/quarter/whatever is a quick and easy mitigation strategy. If a company's culture is such that certain groups of workers feel alienated or disengaged, they're not going to be doing their best work. For every you who gets put off by touchy feely "corporate values" bullshit initiatives, there may be multiple others who, because of the aforementioned bullshit initiatives, start feeling more included and like they have the backing and support to do their best work, to perform their duties quicker, etc. It also means employers have a handy rubric which they may use to get rid of troublemakers, arseholes and jobsworths as well as anyone who would normally be too competent to fire but also don't really hit enough boxes on management's "ideal employee of [company]" card.
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Feb 16, 2022 19:53
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:My workplace has wallpaper with the values on and in every appraisal you have to select which values you/your manager/your peers embody. I'd sever after first appraisal, because gently caress that poo poo.
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Feb 16, 2022 20:56
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I'd like to work at a place where the values are reasonable and actually obeyed tho. But being oorah about the theoretical company values and then blatantly ignoring them in day to day work is the fastest way to have me disengage from the work.
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Feb 16, 2022 20:59
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Referring to values makes my brain check out in a self preserving way to avoid retaining in memory the fart huffing psychic harm that comes from people collectively doing the duplicitous corporate ceremonial posturing over them. It’s so gross and insincere. But my current company’s is okay, they’re just stuff like “when in doubt, do what feels right”. Some people really get off on the values, or we have people pay them lip service in interviews, but this is the most inoffensive experience I’ve had with them. It’d be nice to just do work and not have this layer of poo poo that we all have to pretend around, but a situation where that’s the case probably has no insulation between me and the owners, which realistically means poor working conditions and lots of overtime.
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Feb 16, 2022 21:48
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froglet posted:If a company's culture is such that certain groups of workers feel alienated or disengaged, they're not going to be doing their best work. For every you who gets put off by touchy feely "corporate values" bullshit initiatives, there may be multiple others who, because of the aforementioned bullshit initiatives, start feeling more included and like they have the backing and support to do their best work, to perform their duties quicker, etc. The people you want doing more work aren't going to be encouraged by these initiatives - e.g. it may motivate inexperienced developers and "non-technical" (read: illiterate and/or willfully ignorant) people. You don't want those people producing more "value."
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Feb 16, 2022 22:14
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:The people you want doing more work aren't going to be encouraged by these initiatives - e.g. it may motivate inexperienced developers and "non-technical" (read: illiterate and/or willfully ignorant) people. You don't want those people producing more "value." Not only are you wrong in general (especially by implying that non-technical people and junior devs don’t produce value) but the way you frame it smells a lot like the coinbase/basecamp “don’t bring politics to work” nonsense. Company values are a way to codify the things that matter to all employees, not just self-styled 10x-ers who don’t care where or for whom they crank out code. Culture fit interviews are basically designed to weed out folks with your attitude and I’m glad that places are doing them. I’d rather work with 100 less technical people than suffer the attitude you’re presenting.
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Feb 17, 2022 01:14
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Blinkz0rz posted:Company values are a way to codify the things that matter to all employees In an ideal world: yes. In practice: fart huffing. A company's culture and values aren't determined by what they paid someone to stencil on the wall, it's what they actually choose to do day in and day out. We spent months on my old companies values and I can't remember a single one.
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Feb 17, 2022 01:41
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prom candy posted:In an ideal world: yes. In practice: fart huffing. A company's culture and values aren't determined by what they paid someone to stencil on the wall, it's what they actually choose to do day in and day out. We spent months on my old companies values and I can't remember a single one. What you’re talking about is an in-group. That probably works fine in small companies where everyone knows everyone else and can self-organize around a set of shared values. It’s much harder as you scale a company because all of a sudden there’s no consistent thread of communication; teams silo around functions or locations and suddenly you have a bunch of de facto little companies that have competing values and can’t find a common thread to work off in order to collaborate. Company values are a solution to a problem of scale but as usual it’s been cargo culted to death in the same way agile has.
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Feb 17, 2022 01:52
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Part of our interview scorecard is "how well does the person embody our six company values" and I've just never filled out that section because I have no clue what half the phrases are even supposed to mean.
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Feb 17, 2022 02:26
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I worked for a company that held "Trust and be trusted" as one of their top values. I discovered a privilege escalation security vulnerability and brought it to my manager, then cto comes back and says 'it's a minor vulnerability, we're not going to tell customers but we'll prioritize the fix.' It remained backlogged for 4 months without a word to the vulnerable customers, who had a simple mitigation if they knew. I've always experienced "strong culture = strong management". Which, if management is doing well is fine, but if they form cliques and play politics turns the whole place to a nightmare hellscape before you can bail out.
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Feb 17, 2022 02:37
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Blinkz0rz posted:What you’re talking about is an in-group. That probably works fine in small companies where everyone knows everyone else and can self-organize around a set of shared values. This is why I'm just largely not interested in working for bigger companies. A very small company doesn't need a lot of ceremony or naval gazing to get things done.
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Feb 17, 2022 05:26
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I quit my agency job end of last year and having all-day 'what are our values' whiteboard workshops the same week we were being told developer utilisation time was too low was a nontrivial part of it. turns out the MANTRA developed from the workshop was that we cared a lot about our customers while also having fun doing it! That was a great use of 300 person-hours.
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Feb 17, 2022 05:51
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(this was the same place where the dev team arrived in the new office to check it out and discovered that they'd arranged for giant vinyl coloured text on the wall in the dev area saying IF YOU DON'T SHUT YOUR TWITTER WE'LL SKYPE YOU IN THE FACEBOOK') (it disappeared very quickly)
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Feb 17, 2022 05:54
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My favourite was "customer obsessed", or maybe it was "customer first" or something like that. The main place where we were cutting costs and catching up with missing deadlines was testing, because the customers will just find and report the bugs for us 
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Feb 17, 2022 08:24
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Blinkz0rz posted:What you’re talking about is an in-group. That probably works fine in small companies where everyone knows everyone else and can self-organize around a set of shared values. Empty platitudes don't build culture. Engaged management living the values builds culture, but if you have that, you don't need the platitudes.
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Feb 17, 2022 08:31
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Xarn posted:Empty platitudes don't build culture. Engaged management living the values builds culture, but if you have that, you don't need the platitudes.
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Feb 17, 2022 09:08
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xiw posted:(this was the same place where the dev team arrived in the new office to check it out and discovered that they'd arranged for giant vinyl coloured text on the wall in the dev area saying IF YOU DON'T SHUT YOUR TWITTER WE'LL SKYPE YOU IN THE FACEBOOK')  I’ve never heard anyone outside of HR refer to values non-sarcastically so I find it hard to believe there’s a bigger group that like them than hate them. A corporate version of “live laugh love” can’t actually support you in day-to-day work; they’re designed to be vague enough so that you can’t actually use them to get anyone to do anything, and the previous posts here show that. A value is never going to be an SLA like “All vulnerabilities reported to customers within 1 day” where you could actually point out someone not meeting it. A value will be something like “Customer Trust!” which could mean bloody anything. The real values of the company are defined by what management does in practice, not whatever aspirational phrases they picked out of a hat. Blinkz0rz posted:Company values are a way to codify the things that matter to all employees, not just self-styled 10x-ers who don’t care where or for whom they crank out code. I mean, look, most jobs are just a job. 99% of employees at PaperclipCorp DON’T care about the customers or management of PaperclipCorp. Writing down “customer first” on a whiteboard doesn’t solve that, it just makes those people roll their eyes and go back to what does matter to them (getting free coffee, having health insurance, being able to leave work at 5, etc etc).
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Feb 17, 2022 10:30
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Invited to final round interviews for a team I'm really excited about. The project sounds great, the team structure solid, everything looks good. This reads like The Big River In Volmarias fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 17, 2022 19:40
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My boss demanded I explain why I take so many bathroom breaks every day and I pointed out that one of our core values is to be productive.
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Feb 17, 2022 21:31
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I do 'culture' interviews and it is a mix of asking about your past work experiences and how you would handle some hypothetical situations. What I'm looking for are descriptions of how you have handled or would handle various concrete workplace situations - from being inundated by feature requests from multiple directions to working on a system with poor documentation to that co-worker who refuses to write unit tests. It's all about the specific steps that you took/would-take to manage or resolve a situation. Platitudes are pretty much ignored. It's not the kind of stuff that a coding interview tells you anything about. You could argue that it is easy to game such an interview and just give the "right answers". You might even go all Kant on it and split hairs about whether someone updated documentation from a sense of duty or merely because they were a p-zombie who acts in accord with duty because they know updating documentation made them look good. Maybe they are just flat out lying about having updated documentation. At the end of the day it doesn't matter. If they describe a situation where they took concrete action to help the team then it expresses that they at least *know* that helping other people is a desirable goal and something that is expected of them. Its also difficult to fabricate the level of detail and specificity that I get into on-the-fly. It might seem like a low bar, but then again so is fizzbuzz.
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Feb 18, 2022 17:24
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“Culture” interviews at my employer have become a taboo way of referring to them, as DEI folks said they result in people hiring people who are like themselves, essentially resulting in a bunch of upper class white and Asian guys from “good” schools. Our culture panels were already structured with rubrics before and focus heavily on behavioral questions with specific situations. So all the hiring managers did was rename our “culture” panel to “collaboration” panel, leaving the questions and grading unchanged, and apparently that’s all it took to get the thumbs up from DEI. 
biceps crimes fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 17:32
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God, I hate the behavioral interviewing style. “Tell me about a time you did something so loving common that anyone who remembers the details of a specific incident is either telling a well rehearsed lie, a bullshit artist, or a bit of a weirdo.” Never done well in one of those, and honestly have no real interest in getting better at them since I fundamentally disagree with the practice. An interview should be a conversation between humans, not whatever that nonsense is.
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Feb 18, 2022 17:56
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bi crimes posted:“Culture” interviews at my employer have become a taboo way of referring to them, as DEI folks said they result in people hiring people who are like themselves, essentially resulting in a bunch of upper class white and Asian guys from “good” schools. Our culture panels were already structured with rubrics before and focus heavily on behavioral questions with specific situations. So all the hiring managers did was rename our “culture” panel to “collaboration” panel, leaving the questions and grading unchanged, and apparently that’s all it took to get the thumbs up from DEI. I really wish DEI efforts would focus more on the upstream stuff. I don't see how you're going to make meaningful progress without changing the demographics of the candidate pool. Like, when people start talking about how 50% of roles should be women it just doesn't make sense. That's literally impossible to do across the industry. The pidgeon hole principle applies to humans just as well. It's easier to flail around trying to make a difference doing things that can't have a wide impact I guess.
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Feb 18, 2022 18:06
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I'm curious to know what folks DO want out of their non-technical interview rounds, there are a lot of DONTS constantly being posted about here. I'm a lowly Senior Dev at my company but have signed up to conduct interviews for our summer internship program and they are putting me through a training sometime next week. I've never conducted interviews before and I'm excited to learn how to handle things from the opposite side of the aisle, I'm particularly excited about doing technical screenings, I don't know how much freedom they will give me but I don't want to fall into the traps constantly talked about here.
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Feb 18, 2022 18:13
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Fano posted:I'm curious to know what folks DO want out of their non-technical interview rounds, there are a lot of DONTS constantly being posted about here. Same! I mostly see culture values as a way to have a focused and consistent way to interview. Otherwise you end up with most people winging it and letting their biases take over.
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Feb 18, 2022 18:17
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Fano posted:I'm curious to know what folks DO want out of their non-technical interview rounds, there are a lot of DONTS constantly being posted about here. For non-tech interviews, you're really looking for obvious signals not to hire the person. And an indication that they'd be able to work with the teams and structures already in place. E: also team fit stuff. Would the role have to talk to sales, but they just openly complain about sales people? Probably not a good fit for the role
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Feb 18, 2022 18:18
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chglcu posted:God, I hate the behavioral interviewing style. “Tell me about a time you did something so loving common that anyone who remembers the details of a specific incident is either telling a well rehearsed lie, a bullshit artist, or a bit of a weirdo.” You know it’s pretty easy to Google “common behavioral interview questions” and practice answers for a few of them, right? I’m sorry but you should absolutely be able to tell a good story when I ask “Tell me about one of the most difficult bugs you fixed” or “Tell me about a time when you had to cut project scope” without lying or bullshitting.
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Feb 18, 2022 18:29
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chglcu posted:God, I hate the behavioral interviewing style. “Tell me about a time you did something so loving common that anyone who remembers the details of a specific incident is either telling a well rehearsed lie, a bullshit artist, or a bit of a weirdo.” Never done well in one of those, and honestly have no real interest in getting better at them since I fundamentally disagree with the practice. An interview should be a conversation between humans, not whatever that nonsense is. Yeah, but you should be prepared for common questions interviewers will want to ask you. They're trying to evaluate your fit in 45 minutes or an hour or whatever. Usually you're going to be asked some usual suspect questions. "Tell me about a hard decisions you had to make, who benefited from that decision?" "Tell me about a time you had difficulty with a coworker. How did you handle it? What was the resolution" etc. They may feel bullshitty, but they'll produce more signal than just shooting the poo poo for an hour and hiring off of vibes. I've had dozens of red flags get raised from these questions over at least 100 hundred interviews I've conducted with these types of simple questions, often from candidates you think would fit well based on being similar to you or having similar interests and background or whatever. If someone acts perplexed by these pretty basic questions, it's a signal that they haven't done basic preparation that one can reasonably expect out of a candidate that has decided to interview for a new job. Yeah, socially savvy people can cook up bullshit, and the stories can't be verified for accuracy, which requires the interviewers to have experience and to be able to determine if they're being told stories. It's not perfect, but you can cut a surprising number of candidates out with some really basic questions. biceps crimes fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 18:45
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Harriet Carker posted:You know it’s pretty easy to Google “common behavioral interview questions” and practice answers for a few of them, right? I’m sorry but you should absolutely be able to tell a good story when I ask “Tell me about one of the most difficult bugs you fixed” or “Tell me about a time when you had to cut project scope” without lying or bullshitting. I would honestly have to bullshit the details on difficult bugs, since I don't remember the specifics of them or they all blend together when it's asked as just a general question. The pertinent stuff comes back if I run into similar issues, but otherwise those memories are just locked up somewhere. I also don't remember many details of random poo poo that happened at work years ago. Like for the scope question question, sure, I've worked on projects that had to be scaled back, but no, for the most part I don't remember the exact circumstances or specifics to the level that interviewers want to go in to.
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Feb 18, 2022 18:54
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bi crimes posted:it's a signal that they haven't done basic preparation that one can reasonably expect out of a candidate that has decided to interview for a new job.
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Feb 18, 2022 20:36
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fourwood posted:It’s actually a signal that all interviewing is garbage. how do you propose hiring for a role on your team? someone you have to work with for 40 hours a week who can either make your life easier or make it awful? assume you can't just hire your friends or people you have worked with
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Feb 18, 2022 22:17
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In all fairness, just because it's something we kinda have to do doesn't also not make it garbage.
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Feb 18, 2022 22:29
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Harriet Carker posted:You know it’s pretty easy to Google “common behavioral interview questions” and practice answers for a few of them, right? I’m sorry but you should absolutely be able to tell a good story when I ask “Tell me about one of the most difficult bugs you fixed” or “Tell me about a time when you had to cut project scope” without lying or bullshitting. i hate them because i can't remember any of that poo poo. if it happened more than a week ago, it's gone from my brain
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Feb 18, 2022 23:15
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