Well, of course company's overall culture is important towards its success. But I am particularly asking the employee part of it. While traditional wisdom says that if you treat your employee badly, you will not be able to retain talents, thus in return it would hurt your long term success. However, even though companies like Amazon and Uber have a bad reputation of how they treat their employees. They are still very successful in their sectors. So it looks like for some companies, as long as you have a sound bossiness model and good execution, you will be success regardless you have the best people or not. I am wondering could some day the whole tech industry becomes this way that engineer all be replaceable just like workers in other industries, so a union would become a thing? Anyone want to chime in? Also any Amazonians or Ubers want to comment here, do you see your company culture has any negative on the company's business? Would really like to hear your insider thoughts on this.
Culture matters but not as much as market fit and luck. See Sun Microsystems, twitter and SGI. Google and FB are riding high not because of their culture or engineers or sales or marketing. Most of their success is luck and market fit.
Thanks for your perspective, make sense to me
What I mean by luck is: DEC computers. Great engineers, printing money, cool products, started with a product that was great market fit and succeeded. And then, the market just shifted from under them. No one wanted those expensive workstations anymore. Bam! Down they went. This is just bad luck. The dot com bust was bad luck for Sun. Competition from fb was bad luck for Orkut. Each of these companies had visionaries, product fit and good engineers. But sometimes things go bad out of their control.
Machiavelli said a leader should try to be both feared and loved (Steve Jobs was great at this), but if you can't do both, it's better to be feared. If you give too many free shit to your subjects, they'll just become spoiled and start complaining all the time.
Out of tech industry there's no such thing as nice culture. It's all the tech people who are screaming culture culture culture. Look at investment banks they treat people like slaves but who give a shit.
Eh...not really. They work a lot of hours but the culture is actually pretty reasonable. A lot of type As vying for the next promotion (no different than tech) but also support each other. That was my experience. In it for the money bitches. Money used to be a lot better tho, but give me another job that where you can make $500k after 4 years from grad pretty consistently (used to be $700k at the VP level for IB)
I don't think it's a fair characterization to say that Uber treats its people badly. We as a company sure have our share of trouble. But I think overall Uber tries to do right by its people.
I think culture matters in tech primarily in teams which are trying to innovate. And that also boils down to the fact that engineers want to work with others who are equally motivated and enthusiastic. In case of companies that grew in spite of bad culture, at their peek they had very little competition in the industry. I'm not sure that approach will sustain in a highly competitive environment.
Money talks, everything else secondary. We are group of mercenaries.