Sabotage 101: Company Culture Meltdown
Playbook for destroying company and engineering culture
It doesn’t matter if you are an executive pushed by shareholders’ anxiety, a director facing tough decisions, or a manager tasked with reshaping their team. You have to do your part and turn everything upside down, even if it means destroying the current culture in favor of a greater benefit, such as company profitability, your superiors’ profitability, or, if you’re lucky enough, your own profitability.
In these cases, you can't just wing it. There are a few concepts to reconsider in a new light and a dedicated playbook to follow step-by-step.
1. Values are Trends
One of the most pervasive myths in the corporate world is the notion of company values. Don’t be scared, these are supposed to be guiding principles, but the reality is they are just superficial declarations to fill the "Who We Are" page of your company's website and every job description published on LinkedIn.
They're shaped according to current trends rather than genuine convictions, as with anything else, it’s the market that demands it. A few companies in the industry try to adopt unique or authentic values, but honestly, that is a waste of time and doesn’t pay you back. Why bother striving for originality when conformity seems to be the path for survival?
Consider the evolution of workplace values over the decades:
1970s/80s: Casual dress codes and lip service to women's rights, though women were predominantly relegated to lower-tier positions within companies. The rise of open-plan offices symbolized a supposed commitment to collaboration.
1990s: In times of economic uncertainty, corporate communication emphasized job security, loyalty, and the illusion of upward mobility within the organization.
2000s/2010s: The emergence of the startup culture brought incredible perks such as ping-pong tables, on-site massages, gourmet meals, and trendy office spaces, all in the name of fostering collaboration and open communication.
2020s: The pandemic prompted a collective reckoning with personal wellbeing and a sort of social awakening. Concepts like remote and hybrid work arrangements gained prominence, alongside a newfound emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. There's no need to really commit; just need to green/pink/whatever-washing.
These are mere marketing tactics, and you have to start adopting them. It's all about going through the motions. Hold a token DEI session during the quarterly All-Hands meeting. Toss in a work-from-home day to show off your "hybrid" work model. And of course, don't forget to swap out the company logo for a rainbow version every June. You know the drill, it's part of the playbook.
2. Bother them
This might seem quite vague, but the concept is actually very simple. Workers should never feel calm and safe at work. You always need to give them small daily shocks, disturbances, and unpleasant inputs. You have to set a higher bar for stress and anxiety in the workplace.
Let me give you a few examples to help you understand what I am talking about:
Invite employees to a mostly pointless face-to-face meeting, giving them one or two weeks' notice. Needless to say, the shorter the notice and the longer the journey (e.g. another country or continent), the better. Occasionally, it's necessary to disrupt their personal lives for a few days, causing issues for their families. This is an ideal way to filter out individualists and keep as many workaholics as possible. Over time, they will increasingly focus on the only thing left in their lives: their job.
Every decision must be prepared with an anxiety hype. There is no need to simply announce to people what you have decided. It’s much better to follow what every AAA game studio and film company has been doing during the last few years, for example:
Announce in a public channel or by email that something important is going to change.
Schedule a meeting titled with “IMPORTANT” with no further details in the description, or just something allusive but also ambiguous.
Don’t answer any questions about what’s happening, and don’t give any details to the lower levels. They have a closer relationship with workers, and there is the risk they might reveal something.
Waste some of their time. Create dedicated daily/weekly meetings for each core service, project, process, even better if managed by a TPM/PM/APM who controls and leads every single decision, implementing a proper micromanagement.
Set strategic and recurring meetings at annoying hours. These are very important to eliminate any sense of flexibility they might have. A standup at 8:30-9 AM to disrupt the school run of a parent, or preventing commuters from getting a slightly later train to avoid peak hours. Scheduling a recurring retrospective meeting at lunchtime or 5:30 PM are also great ideas.
The default setting for the company calendar should be kept as private. Employees should not be aware in advance of what management is discussing, or even that a meeting is taking place and who is participating. As a bonus, occasionally invite an employee to an ongoing meeting, with a vaguely plausible reason.
Only discuss planning and important matters at the highest level possible. At most, you should reach out to their team lead, staff engineer, or engineering manager, depending on your organizational structure.
3. Transparency
Speaking of values, transparency has never been a thing so far. Unfortunately, as we said, the current trend puts some emphasis on it. Your role is to provide some sort of transparency on business facts and demand the same from employees. Of course, you just need to pretend on your side. The purpose is to preserve in your staff the bare minimum sense of trust, especially when you can’t completely control them in an office as it was before.
A few concrete actions:
Hold sporadic town hall meetings where superficial issues are discussed, but real concerns are brushed aside or ignored. The most important thing is to give them the impression that decisions have been made between the last and the current session, after gaining their feedback.
Share only convenient news (positive or negative, depending on the period) or partial information while concealing critical details on current developments.
Organize events where executives make brief appearances or give scripted speeches without engaging in meaningful dialogue or addressing employee questions. Be sure that if there is a Q&A session, to open the Slido/Dory/Mentimeter as close as possible to the meeting and not leave it open during the meeting itself, so there is enough time to prepare the blowing smoke answers. Needless to say, disable the possibility for anonymous questions. If too many complaints arise (it will happen), just make sure to have VPs/Directors conduct similar sub-org meetings where Q&A is live, allowing them to show a smaller audience the humanity of the company. Divide et impera is key to handling uprising.
Establish ethics hotlines for reporting misconduct, mobbing, overtime work, and harassment, put HR in front of employees, and let them play with the brick wall. Sometimes this is also required by local laws, so you have to do it anyway.
4. Engineering
This topic needs a separate chapter. Software engineers tend to be anarchic, often individualistic, and it’s difficult to impose nonsense and incoherence on them. You hired them precisely for that reason.
Your engineering culture has also been shaped by the ingress filter you established in your selection process. There is a clear trade-off: the smartest engineers are often the most problematic when it comes to making hard decisions, while the more accommodating ones aren’t as performant during stable periods. Even though not always possible, to achieve the best results, you are better off implementing the following measures using the boiling frog technique, letting them adapt to small changes over time.
Reorg: Keep doing reorgs. Something doesn’t work? Reorg. Lack of strategy? Reorg. Don't let engineers get too close to their teammates or too comfortable in their roles and areas of expertise, as they could become bottlenecks or be hard to replace later on. In general, reorganizations offer executives so many benefits that they would need a whole book to cover the subject.
Feedback illusion: Occasionally, make them feel like their feedback is valued by pretending to listen to their ideas. Carry out engineering surveys now and then, and hold unproductive skip-level meetings every six months to maintain the illusion.
Ownership: Shared ownership could be a headache for management. From your perspective, it might work for some low-maintenance tasks, but for new developments and cutting-edge projects, ownership should lie with the aforementioned *PM. It's much better to have control over a small group of puppets, rather than empowering your teams and allowing them to plan and design their own projects. Engineers often complain about quality, but that's not really something we should prioritize. The business must be profitable, and engineering just needs to serve its purpose being standardized enough so that we can replace workers if needed. As a side note, Java/.NET/React, and any industry-standard language or framework, perfectly serve this exact objective.
Gradually shift back to a blameful culture: Blameless culture stepped in a few years ago. It was so easy to identify a specific person for an incident. Now things have gotten more complicated. There must be a process that identifies a root cause, and then there are some actions to take. Engineers love that. But at the higher levels, you don’t.
People need to assign human responsibility. For many law systems, fault is individual, and even when an automatic process is involved, down the line one or more physical individuals have to pay in some form or another. We can’t accept that an algorithm or an AI model killed a person driving a car, and the same is here.
There is no need to remove their beloved blameless processes, just attach the final ownership of a product or service to a single person so that they will have full responsibility, whatever happens.
Embrace Silos: In recent years, "silo" has almost become a swearword, along with "technical debt." The reality is that silos can be beneficial from a management perspective. They allow for better identification of who is working on what, and reduce the possibility of leaks of corporate secrets. Segregation is key. IT team is your best ally here, just go and request separate and granular access for repositories, services, and contributions. Communication channels in Slack/Discord/Teams should be kept private, there's no need for people to pry into others' conversations. Knowledge sharing is something engineers love to talk about, but they simply want to stick their noses into others’ affairs in the name of collaboration.
Entropy is the natural direction of the universe, and sabotaging culture is certainly easier than creating it, but a proper work still requires some dedication.