[david_mitchell]

I was watching those stanford videos YC made last year recently and in one of them they encourage founders to write down a set of values, principles, beliefs etc that employees should follow. Then drill it into them at every opportunity.

The idea behind it is that as your company grows you end up making less of the decisions yourself. Setting a framework for employees in making their own decisions maximises the chance that they would make the decision you might want them to make if you were directly involved.

Zuckerbergs 'move fast and break things' is the perfect example of this. It gave him the chance to set the tone for developers for years after he ceased writing the code.

Where companies go wrong with this is just dishing out the guidelines without explaining the reason behind having them. Doing that leaves everyone thinking it's just some management bullshit.

[chrismarlow9]

That's confusing. Don't you hire people that specialize in their fields as you grow, so wouldn't you want them making the decision that THEY would make, and not your shitty decision? An example being that you don't really want your DBA to "move fast and break things"...

[rpedela]

It is about more than which algorithm to use, etc. Let me share an anecdote.

I worked for a company who decided to try and build their own gaming console. As hard as that is, it did make some sense since the company was contracted to design and develop some of the hardware and low-level software for a major gaming console (will remain nameless). The project failed for several reasons, but one of them was that only a couple people on the team understood games and the gaming industry. Even though from an engineering perspective we could easily build a console, we also had to make a great user/gaming experience which we had no experience with as a company. The result was that great engineers were making horrible product decisions because they didnt understand video games.

The solution to that specific problem would have been to hire good people who understand games and teach everyone else about games and the gaming industry. That way the great engineers would be able to make great product decisions within the context of gaming.

Or more generally, one of the jobs of a founder is to build a business whose culture is more likely to produce good product decisions given the context of who the users are, the product, and the industry. One of the ideas I like a lot to accomplish this is to make engineers do customer service. When an engineer gets the same bug report three times, they are more likely to fix it sooner rather than later.

[chrismarlow9]

I don't think you can nail down a specific solution to your anecdotal problem. I suspect if only a few engineers on the team actually enjoyed games and they were forced into a "gaming company" atmosphere they likely would have started putting in resumes after feeling like they were part of a "bait and switch". You hired them to do one thing, and now it has become something else. There are other factors around the gaming industry that might cause them to jump ship (it's well known amongst engineers that gaming companies are typically high turnover and low chance for long term success). Those engineers wanted to work on embedded systems and firmware, and have no desire to learn about gaming, so forcing them into it might backfire as "just more bullshit from the manager".

I think forcing engineers to do customer support is a bad idea as well. You're using something that should be seen in a positive light (helping the customer) as a punishment.

In both of these cases it seems like the solutions to things are to try to excite engineers about doing things they were not hired to do. Hire customer relations people to fight with the engineer FOR the customer. Bring in consultants to help plan what and how the gaming console should be done, and let the engineers code it. But of course there are no real "rights" or "wrongs" in any of this. It's all opinion of whatever the real boss (the manager of managers) can be convinced to do.

[rpedela]

Your first paragraph is full of really bad assumptions about the situation.

> I think forcing engineers to do customer support is a bad idea as well. You're using something that should be seen in a positive light (helping the customer) as a punishment.

Not necessarily. Sure some engineers dont want to do customer service at all and would view it as a punishment, but then they shouldnt work there. Creating a good culture doesnt mean making everyone happy. Creating a good culture means finding the people that will thrive in that particular culture and only those people. In the customer service case, that means finding people who enjoy it or at least don't mind. And if someone hates it, then they should leave. It is not good for the person or the company for them to stay just for the money or benefits.

[mgkimsal]

> It is not good for the person or the company for them to stay just for the money or benefits.

That's a bit short sighted. It might be perfectly good for the company to keep people with skills XYZ employed. Not everyone is going to do customer support. I'll be pretty sure even where some CEOs do actual 'customer support' (in whatever capacity) the janitors and CFOs and in-house legal counsel aren't also manning the email support desks.

So then we're left with "well... some people should be doing customer service along with all their other duties". It's an arbitrary line.

I do agree that having most staff do some support work in many companies (or, at very least, shadow support staff for a week or so) can have a lot of benefits - you see things from different perspectives, you get to know what the real problems are, how people are using your product and how people view your company, etc.

[rpedela]

> Not everyone is going to do customer support. I'll be pretty sure even where some CEOs do actual 'customer support' (in whatever capacity) the janitors and CFOs and in-house legal counsel aren't also manning the email support desks.

Agreed.

[guiseppecalzone]

Joseph here again. I wrote the post.

I think this is spot on. I used to hate the ideas of values, since I only saw examples of it done incorrectly. I’d see corporations create values or frameworks and it was obvious that they never adhered to them. So, we didn’t have company values for the first few years of the company. Then, a group of people on the team came to me and said we needed values to preserve our culture as we grew. The idea to create values was a grassroots effort at HelloSign. Then, we went on a retreat to create them. A year later, the team was absolutely right. Values have been hugely helpful in sustaining our culture as we grow.