The outsized impact of cultural idiosyncrasies

Contents

In the context of companies, cultural idiosyncrasies are fascinating to me.<br>I’m of the opinion that culture (including mission, principles, and values) is one of the biggest factors that differentiates companies from one another.<br>Sure, the product or service is often the largest differentiator, but culture—and in particular, cultural idiosyncrasies—has an outsized impact on both public company image as well as internal culture and job satisfaction.

Why?

I believe it’s because these idiosyncrasies are evidence of what a company does, and not just what it says it does.<br>They reflect principles and values in uniquely powerful ways to both potential customers and employees.

Some examples

Let me draw some examples from my own lived experience, and I’m sure I’m missing some compelling examples further back (Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC).

Also, and importantly, I’m not saying any of these idiosyncrasies are “right”, but I am saying they all have an outsized impact on my perception of the companies.

Google

One of the earliest examples from my own memory is Google.<br>Not only did I experience how Google Search took over the market with its minimalism and effectiveness, but I also grew up hearing all sorts of news about how Google was “the best place to work”.<br>In those articles, did they talk about search?<br>Nope.<br>They talked about cultural idiosyncrasies: free meals from on-site cooks, nap pods, 20%-projects, slides in the lobbies, micro-kitchens, laundry services!

Oxide Computer

Oxide is a prime example.<br>They frequently feature in online discussion, but in my perception, the majority of this discussion isn’t about their product; it’s about their culture, and often with highly positive sentiment.<br>They find this so core to their company that they dedicated a podcast episode to it.

Some examples are demo Fridays, morning water-cooler, no-meet Wednesdays, recorded meetings, dog-pile debugging, RFDs (requests for discussion), no performance reviews, an overwhelmingly writing-focused hiring process, and uniform and transparent pay, to name a few.

GitLab

GitLab may not have the popularity of GitHub, but they have made a strong impression on me for at least two of their idiosyncrasies.

One of the first of these was particularly prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic: a global, all-remote workforce.<br>They are one of the largest all-remote companies with over 1,500 members in 65+ countries.

They are also known for their transparent, handbook-first approach.<br>They publish their handbook for all to see.<br>This is not brief, either.<br>It comprehensively covers everything: engineering, finance, sales, legal, and more.

This is an incredible show of transparency and goodwill in sharing hard-earned lessons publicly.

37signals

Not to be outdone, the 37signals folks also publish their handbook.

In their case, they have also published highly profitable books about their idiosyncrasies and culture, such as Shape Up (an engineering methodology that many companies are now adopting), REWORK (unconventional business advice), and REMOTE (on remote work).

They also have idiosyncrasies like Omarchy, an opinionated distribution of Arch Linux.<br>They liked it so much they ditched MacBooks as the standard-issue developer laptop and switched to Framework laptops.

Tonari

Tonari is a small Japanese tech startup making some of the most interesting audio/video portals available.

Despite being very small, they contribute significant pieces of their stack to open source, such as innernet, a private network system using WireGuard under the hood.

They also value a heterogeneous compute mix for their developers and were early on the Rust train (note how each of the four engineers mentioned in this blog runs a different operating system: macOS, Arch, Ubuntu, and Pop!_OS).

Palantir

Palantir breaks the mold a bit in this list, because most of the public discussion around it is controversial and focused on the ethics of its business.

That said, they are known for their idiosyncratic chaos culture, where “everything is up for debate”—even a random engineer confronting the CEO at all-hands—and where they do almost anything to move fast—like chartering a private jet to Palo Alto to get the engineering team together during the COVID-19 pandemic.

People I know who have worked there tell me this is an accurate representation.

Jane Street

Notoriously, it’s the OCaml shop people know about.<br>Compensation so high, even for interns, that it’s an idiosyncrasy.

And, most notably to me, they have one of the most interesting tech blogs around.<br>For example, their code review process has such a good reputation that other tech bloggers carve out exceptions for it when talking about code review problems.<br>They care so much about rigor in tests that they not only leverage bleeding-edge strategies like deterministic simulation testing (DST) but they also led the funding round of Antithesis, the pioneers...