What drives your culture?
A company’s culture is made visible by the way decisions and tradeoffs are made between different priorities. Leadership teams consistently tend to value the same things, and people at the company learn to make similar decisions.
I was explaining this to somebody earlier this week and did a quick overview of the big tech companies (generalizing wildly, of course):
— Google is (was?) an engineering company. Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt valued clear thinking and data driven logical decisions. Their leadership team was mostly engineers or highly technical product people, and the decisions were driven by what’s technically possible.
— Apple is a design company. Steve Jobs had a vision of what products had to look and feel like before he would let them go out the door. That craftsmanship and attention to detail persists to this day.
— Facebook / Meta is a product-driven company. Zuckerberg’s original motto was “Move fast and break things”. Just try things, see what works, get it out there and get feedback and iterate. It’s about telling a good story as much as it is about what the right thing to do is from a technical or design perspective.
— Amazon is a profit-driven company. Bezos focused on frugality from the beginning (the infamous door desks), and has explicitly targeted free cash flow as the metric of success. Everybody at Amazon is thinking of ways to save money and drive revenue.
— Microsoft is a sales-driven company, because they are in the enterprise market with long sales cycles, and need to deliver features to get companies to buy thousands of seats at a time. Plus, Steve Ballmer was a sales guy. The culture grew around “what does the customer want?” That’s started to change under Satya Nadella, but the culture was driven by sales for a couple decades.
People that grow up and spend years at one company often have a hard time adapting to a different company, because their instincts are all wrong. They have an expectation of “this is how we do things” and everybody at the new company does things differently. I often see this especially with people who leave Google and come to me complaining that “This makes no sense!”, and I have to gently explain to them that it makes sense, just not from an engineering perspective.
Look around your company. Who or what drives the big decisions at the company? Are you aligned with those values? If not, you may want to consider looking for a job where your instincts will work for you, not against you.
I’d love to hear what drives the culture of other companies in the comments.