Ask HN: What attributes separate company cultures?

As best I can tell, company cultures are a made up marketing invention to retain and attract staff, and encourage Stockholm Syndrome.

"Come work for us, our culture is open and innovative!"

"Don't go and work for them, they have a bad culture!"

Funny how company cultures are totally a matter of opinion, and never measurable, verifiable or falsifiable, and never benefit employees.

Not to say that particular groups or teams don't have certain styles, but the idea that a megacorp has a consistent, company-wide culture that requires careful nurturing by the CEO to keep it special and magical is just absurd.

Some example points:

* How. The best determinant of low confidence is prioritization of how over what. Unless you are a lawyer let business requirements and performance metrics determine the end state. How to do it is ruled by people who fear uncertainty and lack the experience to qualify risk assessments.

* Uncertainty Avoidance. Uncertainty avoidance determines whether a group runs towards or away from risk. This is not a measure of solution attainment but just a measure of openly considering direction.

* Openness. Openness determines the level of transparency and results in perceptions of trust and low corruption. Low internal openness is highly associated with infighting and CYA.

At a high level culture is about how people operate within. It's not good or bad per se but rather how your personality fits into that working style. For instance some companies put a big emphasis on ownership, which means that everyone will be chasing work like a hungry animal to get it done.

This attracts people with ambition and drive, which as a consequence also makes the workplace toxic if there are too many ambitious people.

My take is that culture requires balance, you need different personality types to create that balance in a team and end up with a good culture.

All this to say, the more a company talks about culture the worse their culture is.

There are so many attributes that its impossible to list them all, just like there are countless attributes that can distinguish a person, with new ones being discovered everyday.

You mention "personality" and that's a good analogy for a company's cultures - It's the organization's personality. Just like personalities, most are neither good or bad inherently, they're just different. Some personalities are better suited for certain endeavors (eg. extroverts are generally better at sales) and attract certain type of people more than others.

So a "good" culture is one that aligns well with the business objectives and attracts the type of talent that are better aligned with those objectives.

Here's an example:

Apple has a design-led culture. Product designers have tremendous influence on what products get made and how they get made. One way this expresses itself is in how leaders make decisions: Through demos. Which makes perfect sense when your business is reliant on the tactile experience of a product and its look-feel.

Google, OTOH, has an engineering-led culture. A lot of product decisions aren't made via demo, but with data. Leaders may see a demo of an improvement to, say the search engine, but they'll rely on usage data to determine whether it should be rolled out or not.

These examples also demonstrate how one culture might not be the best for certain lines of business. Apple, relative to the other tech giants, is way behind on its implementation of AI, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's because its not data-driven at its very core.