When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs. "Multi-player is the most fun mode," is a better razor because if you're trying to decide which features to cut, the single player ones are clearly it.
"Anti-value" is, I think, another way to say something similar.
This touches on a cognitive mistake I see often. We often naturally think of choices in terms of "yes or no". Do I want to go out for dinner tonight? Should I ask that person out? Should I buy that house?
But opportunity cost pervades all aspects of life. Our time and resources are finite and any "yes" choice is implicitly a "no" to the other options that give up the capacity to say yes to. It's very hard to make good choices without thinking of those other options.
Framing your values in terms of "razors" or "anti-values" is a good way to get out of the "yes/no" mindset and into the more accurate "which one" mindset. It helps you discriminate among options.
coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), frequent non-skippable dialogue, etc. Why is that not the case?
A game is a very carefully balanced hanging mobile of hundreds of parts and it's very hard to tweak one without risking throwing others off. Inventory management might be tedious, but it may be that simplifying that throws off other more critical game mechanics. Or it could be that the feature ended up being made worse in the process of fixing an even more important mechanic and now the team has simply run out of time to circle back and improve it.
> frequent non-skippable dialogue
Dialog usually is skippable, but if it's not, there could be reasons. For example, games pretty often rely on unskippable transitions to load content in the background and minimize time spent staring at a loading screen.
Saying "make the game fun" is about as actionable as telling a musician to "write a good song".
But going further, fun is not found in any particular feature; it’s an outcome of the total system. A game can be described as fun, or a sequence of events, but you can’t say that a helicopter spawn in an FPS is fun, or not, without further diving into all of the surrounding context.
And you dig deep enough and you realize that it’s not the helicopter specifically that you’re looking for — it’s the action-space it enables, or the potential counter-play (or lack thereof), or the satisfaction in steering, or that it’s simply the act of being rewarded for skilled play, or whatever.
Fun is at best a description that the game and its mechanisms didn’t impede the mechanisms you enjoyed operating.
It’s also why you have an internet argument where someone says “this game is not good, for reasons x,y,z”, and the response is simply “but I enjoyed it”, and it blows up into a nonsensical mess — the two are talking about totally different things; fun is only marginally correlated with good
I used to work with a great designer who used to say the goal was to take the un-fun out. That actually is a more actionable goal.
In the example given, adding something to multiplayer isn't more fun for people who don't play multiplayer, but it may well be for those that do and since they're the focus, the feature gets added. So "prioritize multiplayer" is a useful razor because you can act on it: does it add to multiplayer? yes, it gets kept, no it gets cut. Its actionable. Is it fun? Who knows, you gotta test it out first.
> I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), frequent non-skippable dialogue, etc.
These things are fun to many people. Just not you. Sometimes they are fun to me, usually not. I think "this game is fun" would lead to including more of this stuff, not less.
YouTubers in particular seem to like this kind of stuff.
Think of it as setting achievable goals for yourself. "I want to improve my life!" is a useless objective; while "my appartment is dirty and I want it to be clean" is a useful one.
"Improving one's life" is so vague it's useless (are we talking about love? Health? Work? Family? Housing? Would you even know what to suggest to someone asking you for advice about this?) while "my apartment is dirty" is a clear objective with clearer solutions: "I'll clean it more often/hire a housekeeper".
"The game isn't fun" is just as vague, especially when you have to make choices regarding resources/money, and especially when "fun" is so different depending on people. If we're talking the Sims, for instance, some people will find more fun in creating sims; some, in creating houses; some, in actually playing with their sims. In this context, trying to make the game "more fun" would be meaningless. "These three sides of the game should feel equally developed" is already a bit better, though still very subjective.
Compare that to "is this usable in multiplayer", "does it serve a narrative purpose", "can we show it in a trailer". All of those are quick to answer (but not all of them make for good games).
> adequate performance gets a generous severance package
> We’re a team, not a family; We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team
My current employer's approved hotel list is pretty ritzy, much nicer places than I would stay in on leisure travel... and that's kind of the least they can do to offset the general imposition of work travel.
I don't know about you, but if my salary was $500k+ [1] I'd probably fly business class and stayed at the best hotels when I go on vacation.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Netflix/salaries/Software-Eng...
A recruiting process which discriminates against people who do not share their values will create a more secure sense of belonging among people who do -- even among underprivileged groups who would otherwise worry they do not really fit in.
I don't find anything in that deck even remotely toxic. I find it almost jaw-droppingly honest!
I thought them to be refreshing honest and clear (but have not yet read all slides).
I mean, it is also not attractive for me, because I would not put what is good for Netflix, over what is good for me - but otherwise I do not think a professional, internal competing sports team as a goal, is necessarily toxic.
My interview was cancelled halfway through because the third interviewer didn't like me. shrug
Independent decision-making is also hard to do, as soon as something requires a budget, you can forget about the independent part.
And maybe you can have fewer rules, but instead they will be labelled processes and generally end up having the same effect.
I do agree that highly effective people should be kept, e.g. people who are not afraid to move out of their chosen comfort zone once in a while.
If I should state two core values, they would be critical thinking and curiosity.
My initial approach to the values was a similar "Who cares, these are bland corporatese" one. It wasn't until a 10+ year senior engineer on my team discussed the trade-offs between the values in an architecture meeting that I really understood the purpose. Take two of the values[1]:
"Dive deep" vs "Bias for action" - these have an inherent tension between the two. You can justify any action with either one, but it is about knowing when to apply what. You do not want to be Diving Deep as your first action when you are oncall and your alarms are going off in every direction, but it may need to be your third.
"Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit" has opposite ideas written into it! Having backbone is about being able to back up your position with as much data and research as you can. Disagree and Commit is about not being emotionally invested in your position and not taking things personally when the team chooses to go another way. It is recognizing the fact that you may be working in an area of ambiguity where no one side can be proven right before the fact.
Like most worthy things in life, there is a lot of nuance to these that cannot be expressed in a pithy 140 (or 280) character limit. But the idea that you should have "anti-values" is a very, very useful one. It allows you to think through different scenarios and explain what your team/organization/company would prioritize when there are competing priorities.
I previously felt these contradictions are problematic because they make it harder to use values for prioritisation. It's a good point you make about different values being applicable in different contexts. I wonder whether the context can be incorporated into the value?
For example "Bias for action when the cost of failure is low". In an oncall incident, restarting a stateless service is worth trying even before the problem is understood in depth, because risk of failure is low. There are potential actions in an oncall incident that could quite easily make things much worse - then it's probably worth diving deeper before taking action.
It might not be pithy enough for the value itself, but I think it's at least adding this kind of context to the subtext like Amazon have done in the page you linked to.
> bias for action when it's a reversible decision
I think for us, an implied anti-value would be "Focus on the core product and say no to some customers"
As OP said, no-one would deny that focusing on the core product is bad but at what cost? We have failed in the past by taking on custom work for the cash, and it helped us bootstrap. But to scale, the custom work needs to go away and we need to give the maximum value to the broadest number of customers through the core offering.
You can tell difference between focus on the product and focus on yourself with metrics and how readily people are eager to ignore numbers using excuses from poorly formed reasoning reflective of a more honest intent.
“The more important you are, the less you touch code/servers/things”
“Lots of meetings means you’re important.” (People will frequently humblebrag “I have 13 meetings today”)
“Create a problem, present a problem, let someone else solve, celebrate the solution.”
There’s also many positive values that I think outweigh these anti-values.
I love being presented with puzzles and problems. I hate people messing up, creating crises, and pushing the mess off to other people.
"Descriptive" vs "aspirational" values, if you will.
I want to be a good husband, dedicated employee, etc. Am I? I’d like to think more often than not. But we all err, and I value the transparency/courage to ack that we are not perfect on our values and still have a long way to go.
For me the a flag would be if a person/company is not willing to acknowledge they are not as good as they public values are. (Because how can they improve if they can’t even ack it).
* The actual values have changed over time but the value statement hadn't been updated in a while
* Different parts of the company genuinely have different values
I don't think either of those necessarily indicate a toxic culture.
I’m not sure i could ask smart and direct enough questions to really assess this but hope i can at least sniff out the bs.
A couple of the values pulled out here are from the Amazon Leadership Principles. So there's actually an answer to this question! The opposite of "Learn and Be Curious" is "Bias for Action" and "Deliver Results". The Amazon LPs are designed to have tension with each other. You can't embody all of them at the same moment. Which ones you prioritize are contextually dependent. Which is also helpful for dealing with conflict and disagreement because so many arguments are people talking past each other not realizing that they're actually misaligned on an underlying assumption and wasting energy arguing about how to execute.
"I don't think this is a good path forward, we should take our time to 'Dive Deep' and do more research"... "Ah, that's the issue. We've already agreed as a group the prioritize for 'Bias for Action' because of <reasons>"... "Hrm. In that case I can understand why this path makese sense. If you're all confident that's the right priority here then let's go."
Most teams also have a set of tenets they embrace that are more team-local refinements of what you stand for and how you work. The group I was in had “Bias for Action” and “Earn Trust” as the things to prioritise. Make customers happy, increase their trust in you along the way, deliver results, and do it quickly… it made for a simple framework for decisions and left a lot of autonomy for working out your own plans for execution. You don’t need to reach consensus on _how_ you’re going to do it. Just do it.
So no True Scottsman^h^h^h^h good leader would ever be confused about which LP applied
Without that understanding, it's like there is a hierarchy of companies where the companies where everyone "gets it" on revenue are in their massive exponential growth phase like startups with small teams, then there are the ones who factor it out into KPIs, and the job is literally to move the line on that KPI at scale without any other deep understanding, but their company explosive phase is over and their growth is linear - and then the final company type is where the real revenue factors are effectively secret, and there is a solid long term cash flow the company mainly optimizes its costs over, with no significant forseeable growth other than stock volatility.
Depending on the growth phase of the organization, values and anti-values are sort of moot, as it's a question of what real growth factors your teams understand and are aligned with pushing in a confluent direction. I'd be concerned if someone were sincerely indexed on values, as it seems like a substute for, "we do this thing well that solves this problem for these customers and that makes money so that we can support our families," and anything beyond that seems kind of weird in comparison.
Sure, I've worked for pre-PMF companies that looking back I suspect they were in-effect NFTs for financial/portfolio engineering so there wasn't really a clear way to make money, and they spent a lot of time on inspirational values stories, but that effort should have been spent on finding product market fit.
To me, the only meaningful values quesiton is, when you know who the customers are, do you want to solve that problem for those people? Seems straightforward.
It seems to imply that a "value" means "more". It does not. "Frugality" is a value of that is a behaviour deemed important to follow, it's not an "anti-value" (whatever that might mean).
Similarly, "move fast, break things" means you value action and risk-taking.
I was expecting "anti-value" to mean a behaviour deemed negative and to be avoided.
Like in 'move fast and break things', you are willing to compromise reliability/stability in favour of speed.
"Frugality" is a bit less explicit than "move fast _and break things_. I think the reason it could be considered an anti-value is because it implies obvious _costs_. For example it can cost time in "shopping around", or it could mean that you miss out on opportunities - for example missing out on a great employee because you pay below market rate.
Overly cautious, ponderous delivery is the negative behavior to be avoided if you value “move fast, break things”.
"Break things" is also obviously not to be understood in isolation. Of course breaking things for no reason is not positive. It means that you will break things if you move fast and take risk and that it is unavoidable and worth it.
But that’s only what is desired by the company. Individuals inside the company still push people to do things quickly at the expense of quality.
We also have leadership principles: ‘Play a team sport: so keep discussing everything with everyone until nobody disagrees (either through actual agreement or exhaustion)’.
Another thing; as this one says, the values are the rules (well, should be). Breaking (intentionaly) them is a compromise needed sometimes. While not following, is different matter.. https://8thlight.com/blog/stephen-prater/2020/09/15/values-r...
I'm a Lego Serious Play certified facilitator and what we do with one of our workshops is helping organizations defining what we call Simple Guiding Principles (SGP). SGP's are identified by an org as a set of principles that can help guide autonomous decision making.
The example "Optimise learning over focus" is a perfect SGP as it gives the individual a practical principle to follow, for example when prioritizing his/her time.
*Maximum 25 days a year after 15 years of employment
- You can't even get paroled.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210311001446/https://www.aussi...
Edit: Switched to an archive.org version in response to comments about a captcha being used at the source URL.
Ubi amicita est, ibi idem velle et idem nolle.
"True friendship is in, same likes and same dislikes." [1]
Is the best radar (sonar?) I've found to predict and sense how shallow or deep a friendship with any person you'll have.
Now you can use it as a generator of the types of relations with individuals that you company has/wants to have: founders, developers, marketeers, commercial, support, partners and customers.
[1] So the dislikes part you might take it as the anti-value notion proposed here but is still a value.
PS: about the anti-value notion, I think we're still talking about values. Like a value matrix you have in your deep psychology that is symmetrical. It has the values of the things you're attracted to and the things you are repelled from. Like all the cells in the matrix being little vectors that will eventually synthesise a final position on everything you input.
On the other hand, almost all companies also say that they value their employees and want to respect their work-life balance and QoL.
But what about when a deliverable is going to be late and it will negatively impact a customer. What do you do then? Crunch hard to ship on time so the customer is impacted? Tell your customer the deliverable will be late so your employees can go home and spend time with their families? Try to split the difference down the middle and probably annoy everyone?
That's when values get interesting. When they stop being a list of nice things, and start being a framework for how you intend to behave in difficult circumstances.
Uber once had a stated company value of “Always be hustling”. Really.
Similarly, a company's anti-values could be discovered by who gets less; e.g. passed over for promotion, given a 'window seat', laid off, etc.
As a software developer this is quite nebulous. The bank protects its reputation by prioritizing risk analysis and ethics first in all its internal decisions. As an industry these qualities do not exist in any professional capacity in software. In software, just like in absolutely every employer, we do whatever we want so long as it eases hiring, everything else be damned.
It doesn't always make sense though. The only company I've worked at whose values actually resonated with me, and evidently a lot of other people there, was at Maersk. They are [1]:
* Constant care * Humbleness * Uprightness * Our employees * Our name
They were a great place to work and I saw those values embodied there. Hard to see what the anti values would be for those.
The basic principle they are working on is building trust.
* avoid negativity
* hide the truth
* ego outperforms facts
* kiss ass
* promote incompetence
* stick to your gunsEven the original value itself was problematic since rarely was the intent positive and assuming it was based your actions on a wrong assumption. Depends on the people you work with naturally, but in this particular organisation there was an abundance of people looking out for themselves mainly; e.g. avoiding work, shedding responsibilities, lying, twisting facts, etc, and especially so in management.
The only companies I can think of who do this are the Facebook example from OP, and some of the big investment banks, who make it pretty clear that they do not give a shit about anything except how much money they make. Unfortunately it seems only assholes and sociopaths are transparent in this regard :-/
Every C-level employee is an asshole and probably a sociopath, if this was true every company would be transparent. As that isn't the case, we know that it does not necessarily have anything to do with being an asshole or a sociopath.
That's a big generalization without any argument to back it up.
My experience has been mixed, there were good ones also, but only at the small and medium sized businesses.
"Only assholes and sociopaths are transparent" does not mean "all assholes and sociopaths are transparent".
Further, you probably dont want to pick an extreme tradeoff. Getting a drop more action at the cost of huge learnings is a mistake as is getting very irrelevant knowledge at a huge cost of action.
But no, communicating feel-good meaningless statements (like asking for people to both act fast without waiting for the details and to know the details about the consequence of their actions) is an infallible way to create apathy and move away from the Pareto frontier, not towards it.
Meanwhile staying curious isn't necessarily about researching decisions in particular. It involves for instance ongoing tech education.
So if you think about it ongoing education is totally compatible with making occasional snap decisions.
"Don't be a dick" has good practical mileage.
The Kantian ideal of the Kingdom of Ends is pretty good one if you formulate it as "Don't use people", but that's too high a standard for almost any business today (especially the ones whose entire model is "using people").
One of my personal maxims is "Lead people not into temptation". In other words, no addictive (engagement) features, no lock-in, don't create dependency, make sure the code you write enables people and gives then freedom and choice (migration/federation etc). Again, those values are almost impossible to maintain in todays climate of hyper-exploitation.
The article says people should state values as a tradeoff. So for google it should have been something like:
Favor not being evil over making more money.
A truly uncompromising value, if that was the intent of Google's motto, sits at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and the tradeoff is literally everything else.
Toyota is a great company to work for, albeit super boring.
This is the most insightful comment I've read this week. I'm surprised no one has made the connection before. It has deep historical meaning and deep implications for where we're headed.
They state that they value (as an example) individuals and interactions over processes and tools. But they make it clear that while there's value in the things on the right, they value the things on the left more.
In the way the author describes, I always found this framing to be super helpful for decision-making.
It's also something that frustrated me about the (otherwise fantastic) Amazon Leadership Principles. When should I dive deep and when should I have bias for action? I realise now that I should have bias for action when it's a reversible decision and dive deep when it's a one way door. But it's not clear from the principles themselves in the way it's clear in the Agile Manifesto.
Choosing "don't be evil" as a credo deliberately encourages others to view the company through a moral lens. It is an invitation to judge the company according to a higher standard than most businesses would hold themselves to. It makes explicit that the company takes responsibility for the moral implications of what they do instead of pretending to live in an amoral value-free universe like many other corporations do.
I think it was a courageous motto and I'm sad they dropped it.
Patients First
Important, not Immediate
Learners before Masters
Together, not Alone
Progress before Perfection
Adaptable, not Comfortable
Is better represented as "move fast and break important things" but what kind of management is going to sign up to that.
In essence it becomes "move fast", which becomes another way of saying, "get things done faster or you're not meeting company values and we can blame you for that." Yay for management doublespeak
They were always at least five minutes late for what should have been a five minute stand up because they knew we'd have to wait for them.
I managed to get team agreement we start no later then 2 minutes past, no matter who isn't there, management included, no judgement for late comers but the meeting is starting as we have work to get on with.
Suddenly said project manager started showing up on time. Who knew?
IOW - I see a lot of efforts at ‘curtailing’ mgmt powers. In my experience- Bottom up management or manipulation only goes so far - that’s not far. Pick your managers people. You want nice ones who also know how to hire well.
(Of course, now we do everything remote, so I wouldn’t even know if they are early)
I just don't understand some people.
Drucker - 'The Practice of Management' is full of common sense 'anti-values'
That wfh means you work in every time zone.
Values go out of the window real quick whenever they negatively impact revenue, whatever they are.
I like the idea of anti values, certainly much better, but even there you might as well not have them imo.
Making money is just one of the operational constraints that a company has to take into account.
Companies exist to fulfil a purpose. That purpose is not just "make money".
Steve Jobs founded Apple not to just "make money". I think this does not need further elaboration.
The same applies to Tesla and SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk.
Companies that only exist to make money are probably terrible by any measure you choose.
Hopefully, however, profit is correlated with/caused by providing value to humanity, which in turn encourages "good behavior" from companies. If a company is seen as "bad", it starts to lose clients.
My point is; As long as making money and their values align it's all good, but if decisions need to be made that present a choice between values and profit/growth it becomes very hard to choose for values. Especially once a company goes public, gets acquired, or needs significant investment, it might not even have the option to live by its values.
That's why I think values are only real/true if they align with profit/growth. Similar to what the article describes; what do they really mean? How much impact do they really have? How much of it is PR?
What it comes down to imo is; Is there willingness to sacrifice growth and revenue for values? I'd say in most cases the answer to that is no, and I would much prefer it if companies are just clear and honest about that.
If you do count other forms of companies, like not-for-profits, then it's a totally different story of course.
TL;DR PC means Personal Computer, Linux PC, Mac PC, Windows PC.
I think that says enough about how company and it bosses think.
It's called "people and culture" now.
There's something broken about the highly extroverted non-technical types that are attracted to HR roles thinking they're in charge of shaping the 'culture' of an engineering organization. Please keep them far away from that particular role.
I actively try to use people instead of resources in a conversation, have never understood the need to use resources as a word.
Could be it's just a relic from the HR department.