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You hire the right people and they make the culture. Culture is NOT enforced. It is simply the reflection of you as a good or bad hire-er.


Sort of. However you need to be careful about unexpected consequences.

The vast majority of programmers are male, so if you only hire the best you might go a long time without hiring any females, thus developing a male-only culture. I've been told the worst case of this is one female the rest males, as the one female encourages that bad parts of male only culture to ensure that she is always the most powerful female in the room (because she is the only one). None of this needs to be true, but when you only have 3 males total you need to ensure that you are not developing female hostile culture by accident. Once you have a few females around they can moderate the male only culture, but going from 1 to a few is hard because the great females you want to hire will check your culture and not even apply thus locking you out of that market.

I used females, but there are plenty of other minorities. If the subject was nurses you would reverse the minorities, some of their cultures are male hostile.


I once worked at a place with a strong, great culture. They acquired another place with a strong, great culture. The cultures were diametrically opposed. It turned into an awful culture for both.

People find like-cultured people. Don't hire someone who is a mob programming advocate into a culture that thrives on individual work, or vice versa. Don't hire someone who wants a completely transparent culture into Amazon.


Its a bit of a chicken/egg situation. The right people to hire are the people that meets your requirements. Some of the requirements would be what their cultural beliefs and behaviours. So the cultured is enforced by enforcing the right type of people you hire. It is a vicious circle.




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