It’s Time To Abandon “Company Culture”

It’s tired, grating, and just gets in the way of having fun and getting stuff done.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Company culture has always been something of a concern for me¹, primarily because I remember before it was really ‘a thing’.

The Decade of Simplicity

You see, back in the 1990s when I originally started chipping at the coalface of software engineering having made the mistake of drifting away from a life in academia, company culture, as it was, consisted of one of two following things:

1. Popping into the pub after work on a Friday night for a few drinks with the ‘team’. If you worked in the same town and didn’t have to drive home as there’s nowhere to leave your car overnight and it’s just not worth the hassle, this was tolerable.
2. Mandated appearances at some terrible garish faux-dining high-five place², with mandatory sparklers in the desserts, and on to a nightclub the kind of wish you’d never frequent even in the most inebriated state.

Number one was the most desirable option, of course, provided that you could avoid drinking too much and saying something embarrassing about the team leader’s choice of colour with their chinos³ or how the CEO’s choice of new sports car inevitably indicates a forthcoming mid-life crisis.