[orand]

Sometimes (but not always) the reason for these cultures is more due to nature than nurture, in which case it can be virtually impossible to change without replacing people.

I worked on a team that went from a very strong "debate everything" culture to a very apathetically strong "just tell me what to build" culture, and it was primarily due to the hires we made. We hired for the ability to grow technically, and that certainly proved true. But the interest in the "why" behind the work never developed the way the "debate everything" folks assumed would happen with all good devs. The QA team cared, and remained in "debate everything" mode, but the dev team eventually just wanted to be left alone to focus on relatively meaningless (without context) work. No amount of connecting the dots to real user need seemed to really get through. They just wanted semi-challenging technical problems, and a paycheck. Nothing wrong with that in moderation, but it ended up infecting the entire team.

So be careful how you hire. If you have a blind spot for this phenomenon and hire exclusively for technical skill and/or potential, you might just get unlucky and end up with a critical mass of "just tell me what to build", and then you're screwed, because you'll have a technically strong team that has zero interest in understanding the bigger context of their work, forcing you to choose between getting sucked into the codependent relationship, or resigning yourself to doing the wrong thing with great technical prowess.

[eastbound]

Another startup founder here. I regret not working early enough with an HR expert. It takes forever (any many relationships and many tries) to find the correct one, but:

- They’ll help you profile who you need. Questions you would never have dared asking, like “Tell me a situation when you reacted to xyz”, not only they filter the person, they also change the attitude of the relationship, the person itself goes from “it’s just a job” to “let’s put the extra neurons in, to make a product people actually love”,

- And they’ll give you weight in negotiation, asking questions you never dared asking.

It’s expensive, but recruiting more than one guy will be expensive anyway. And the engineering coming in, will feel safer that it’s a microstartup but it already has the structure to manage them, starting with HR.

And I say that as a person who only saw HR as the legal goon of the boss in the past. Don’t hire those, hire a consultant in recruiting.

[wizhi]

How would me answering how I once "reacted to xyz" make me any more likely to "put the extra neurons in"?

[strgcmc]

Those types of questions are likely to engage "problem solvers", aka people who don't just wait to be told what to do, but who actually demonstrated proactive critical thinking by reacting to a challenge. Those types of people are more likely to put extra neurons in for future problems (contrary to stock markets, past performance is actually a strong indicator of future success, when it comes to hiring).

If you don't have any scenarios from your work experience where you can demonstrate being a "problem solver" who reacts to stuff, then you probably aren't someone to likes to fire up the extra neurons, and hence wouldn't be a fit for the parent comment's desired team/org profile.

[baq]

You say it’s a hiring problem and I see an incentives problem… either way a management failure but what you describe should’ve been reorged promptly.

[strgcmc]

Incentives operate on a slow time-scale. Let's say you have a decent team as a baseline, but starting to fall into this "just tell me what to build" apathetic failure mode. How would you turn this ship around?

As a manger, you could go as far as saying explicitly -- "hey, any engineer who demonstrates customer obsession and shows attention to impact, will receive their choice of project to work on, will get promoted faster and higher than those who don't, etc.", but this is unlikely to create a positive outcome. At best, 1-2 people may rise up, but the rest of the team will resent them for "try-harding" probably; crabs-in-a-bucket mentality is a very natural human group phenomenon. And now you've got 1-2 "stars" who won't want to stick around to deal with the rest of the shitty team members, so once they leave, you're back at square one.

Reorging is a reasonable step to take, but it's risky and you could just as well end up "infecting" other orgs or team members, by carrying the contagion of bad culture with you.

Firing and hiring again more carefully, is honestly both faster and more direct, and shouldn't be seen as a "last resort" option IF the culture is truly too far gone AND the culprits are readily identifiable. First step is probably to make sure you have a firm and accurate diagnosis of the problem, then if you're 99% sure you can identify the right people to fire -- go ahead and fire them.