> although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work."
It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
It's all aggrandizement with very little critical thinking about how these policies and values would actually change the workplace. And the companies often hate when they do.
> Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Along with "giving back" to "the community" in the form of unpaid labor. There is a class system at play where the owners and financiers--not the builders--benefit the most. And they make sure of it. They've effectively co-opted everything that made the early (mid-late 90s) Internet many of us grew up on good and turned it into a money printing machine. Acknowledging that you the worker are a skilled person worth investing resources in, rather than an interchangeable component in the money printer, would give you power they're not comfortable with you having.
> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Hmm, I wouldn't say so. In many countries it is illegal for an employer to prescribe what their employees should do on evenings and weekends, including up-skilling. Handing out promotions based on what an employee does outside work hours would quickly lead to labor disputes and penalties.
I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines. And even in countries where this doesn't matter from a labor law perspective, a continuous improvement grindset culture (where employees work to improve for their work duties on a significant percentage of evenings and weekends) would often lead to morale loss, employee self-neglect and burn-out. Imagine how it would feel to have responsibilities after work (spouse, kids, parents, community commitments, chores, etc) when everyone is grinding to get ahead. You'd have no career prospects, too - a recipe for disengagement. Once again, a company would not actually want the consequences of enforcing this team value.
A better value would be that the company should provide improvement opportunities for their teams (conference tickets, time off work for professional certificates, etc), but same as before - they wouldn't want the real consequences (additional time off work) for having the team actually live such values.
I don't think anyone in most companies truly meaningfully lives those values, nor do they work with these values in mind. They may be slightly swayed towards doing something in line with the values ahead of their next performance review, but beyond that - not really. And that's best for everyone, including the company.
> I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines.
Right - it's left "between the lines". In the US - salaried employees don't have any protections here AFAIK, so even if it became formalized, they wouldn't get fines.
>Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
Has your manager actively asked you what you want to work on or do?
Not sarcasm. Where I work, they talk a big game about "we don't want know-it-alls we want learn-it-alls", and "upskilling" and all that.
But we don't get any dedicated time to actually do that training during business hours. The implication of course is that managers expect it to happen on evenings and weekends.
> It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted.
Sure, same here. What I don't understand is the idea that such pervasive mendacity and self-delusion should acceptably characterize a kind of culture that anyone is expected to regard as worthy of respect.
I realize it has a lot to do with the difference between organizational desiderata and organizational incentives, or put otherwise between asserted and revealed preference. Still, this is a problem in design susceptible to methods of analysis and adjustment recognizably derived as much from engineering as sociology, and it is not a novel field; I first learned of it from books published in the 1960s. The regression in ambient knowledge since then is remarkable, not to say shocking.
I think it's thematically consistent with the lack of rigor in this field. I've been told countless times to deliver provably broken, bug-ridden shit on the premise that "it's better to deliver quickly and iterate". Similarly, I've gotten the management stink-eye from discovering (and proving by fixing it) something that was running totally broken in production for years. When nothing matters, that is when companies can get away with producing garbage, the way they go about producing it also degrades.
So I'd say the amount of attention and rigor applied to values and management principles is roughly commensurate with the amount of attention and rigor applied to product and engineering concerns. That is to say, just barely enough to get by. Yet somehow we print money...
Because that's what it's come to be about. We aren't here to serve our users, our bosses or each other. We are here to serve money and personal ambition, with "meritocracy" inhering solely in whether one serves one's own ambition or another's.
Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.
It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
It's all aggrandizement with very little critical thinking about how these policies and values would actually change the workplace. And the companies often hate when they do.