[pjc50]

> naive mistake of citing the company values as a critique of their behaviour

> companies are acting rationally. They are protecting their own interests. Both in espousing values they may not actually hold

A value is only a value if you'll follow it against your own "rational interests". Claiming you hold a value and then ditching it as soon as it's convenient is a form of fraud. Not one necessarily with monetary damages, but fraud nonetheless.

Western society has got quite a lot out of being generally high-trust and it is not good whenever anyone corrodes it by making cynical promises which they do not intend to keep, and it is right to shame them for this.

[hliyan]

> society has got quite a lot out of being generally high-trust

I agree. The vast majority of times you pass someone on the street and don't expect that person to turn around and stab you in the back and take your wallet, is not because of the existence of laws, but because of the existence of trust. Laws (particularly criminal code) must exist for the minority. This is one of the reasons why I hate "trust-less" systems -- societies cannot function that way. It's as if a program was not trusted to access even the memory that was allocated to it, and the OS had to check permissions and run validations on every single CPU instruction issued by the program. Trust saves resources.

[sokoloff]

Most useful values frameworks have inherent tension in them.

I don't work at Amazon, but their LPs are well-published, so I'll use them as an example. "Bias for Action" is in tension with "Dive Deep" and "Insist on the Highest Standards". If Amazon takes an action that is quick but didn't dive as deep as literally possible or achieve the highest possible standard, have they violated two of their LPs, or did they just use judgment and prioritize bias for action over those other two?

[Jochim]

They fairly explicitly call out that "Bias for Action" applies to low stakes, or easily reversible decisions, whereas "Dive Deep" applies to irreversible, high stakes decisions[0].

"Insisting on the Highest Standards" doesn't conflict with "Bias for Action" either. You can take a quick action, realise it's not up to a high standard and insist that it's improved; as opposed to saying "good enough, we're done".

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/leading-an...

[ShroudedNight]

> Most useful values frameworks have inherent tension in them.

That's ostensibly why Cantrill was going on [fairly entertaining] tirades about the difference between principles and values. By providing a cultural foundation of muddled and inarticulate precepts, and by ambiguating values and principles, leadership was being derelict in its duty to own the responsibility for discernment in scenarios where principles were in conflict with each other.

[bcantrill]

Yes, and at Oxide we have taken this a step further, being explicit about the fact that values are in tension[0] -- and then even asking candidates to describe a time when our values came into tension for them and how they dealt with it.[1] Not to imply that any of this is pat or easy, but I think it's been helpful to explicit about that tension -- and it has also (broadly) prevented us from weaponizing values (another common failure mode).

[0] https://oxide.computer/principles

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAKjEgD...