Values

Values help improve decision making. When faced with multiple tough decisions, company or personal values can help find the 'right' decision faster.

My personal values are encoded as rules I try to follow.

Polite Technology & Tesla's anti handbook are neat.

Interesting values/principles

• Oxide Principles of Operation
• Write.as principles
• Amazon's Leadership Principles
• Glitch Company values
• Figma's engineering values
• Bright Paper
• On Deck - Operating Principles
• Reflect's Values - Speed. Security. Reliability. Less is more.
• Dgraph Core Values
• LIMS Research Principles (HN)
• Nat Friedman's values (Tweet)

Team values

• Commitment, Focus, Courage, Openness & Respect
• Experiment
• Give space for team to focus
• Prioritize (Ability to say no)
• Courage to be wrong (I don't understand).
• Courage to try (fail & learn)
• Open to evaluation
• Call things out
• Respect each other
• Respect the product & the customers
• Respect the decisions of the team

Notes

• Adversity is an opportunity to show great character. Bad things are good things in disguise.
• I don't believe that everyone is replaceable. If you are enforcing a culture everyone is replaceable, you are enforcing a culture people can't demonstrate their unique capabilities.
• PayPal culture: 1. Extreme Focus. 2. Dedication to individual accomplishment. 3. Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal. 4. Radical transparency on metrics. 5. Meritocratic opportunity. 6. Vigorous Debate.
• Many companies try to just bolt on a tactic (i.e. "henceforth we shall write memos") without being intentional about the cultural substrate (i.e. who gets hired, how much do we value charisma vs. rigor, do people care more about correctness or optics..). Culture will eat Tactics.
• The fastest way to destroy an engineering culture is to blame people for raising questions and concerns.
• In an age of decreasing time between ideas and implementations what matters the most is the “generating function” — what culture, mental models, traits, network etc that’s responsible for innovations. That’s something copycats can never copy; they can only copy the last idea.
• A culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions.
• The culture is made by people who join, not the other way around.
• Taking care of the people who work with you is an investment. It doesn't show up on the balance sheet immediately, but creates resilience that is necessary when the inevitable challenge hits.
• Curiosity, thoroughness, humility and empathy.
• Have a culture where reducing technical debt is celebrated as much as launching new products.
• The best values are choices, and emphasize the tradeoff you’re willing to make. If someone else couldn’t reasonably adopt the opposite value (“stability over speed”) the value isn’t distinguishing - it’s a baseline expectation.
• One of the key tools Satya Nadella used to turn around Microsoft was an emphasis on growth mindset over a fixed mindset. A growth mindset is a culture of curiosity, asking questions and listening. A fixed mindset is focused on being right and making statements versus learning.

Links

• List of Questions to consider evaluating culture
• Key Values - Find engineering teams that share your values.
• What Are the React Team Principles? (2019) (HN)
• Cultural Fit - Collaborative list of corporate culture traits.
• A Hierarchy of Engineering Values (HN)
• 4 month at Buildkite (2020) - Amazing account of benefits at a company.
• Values Are the Rules You Break (2020)
• Designing a Culture of Reinvention (2020)
• Working at Stripe experience
• What Working At Stripe Has Been Like (2020) (HN)
• Mission Protocol (HN) (Ostrich Protocol)
• My Engineering Values (2020)
• Compensation as a Reflection of Values (2021) (HN)
• The Values of a Post-Woke World (2021)
• What defines a great company culture? (2021) (HN)
• The 25 Principles for Adult Behavior
• Awesome Engineering Team Principles
• How to build nice company culture (in Russian) (2021)
• Conscious Culture - Bridging Humanity with Execution.
• Protopia Futures Framework (2021)
• Tesla's values (2021)
• 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company (2021) (HN)
• Культура в Злых марсианах (2021)
• Culturally transmitted skills and values (HN)
• Tesla Anti-Handbook Handbook
• Polite Technology
• Awesome Culture
• Benefits as a Reflection of Values / Oxide (2022) (Tweet)
• Favorite company mottos