Stop Arguing With Culture; Optimize the Deal
Most companies showcase values. Few wire them into incentives. That gap frustrates employees who expect consistency. The real system runs on contracts, hierarchies, and business trade-offs. When you see that clearly, you stop wasting energy debating slogans and start aligning with what actually moves decisions.
The Employment Equation
Write it down like an engineer, not a romantic.
You Give
Skills that solve specific business problems.
Availability and reliability under agreed constraints.
Measurable outputs (code, tickets, designs, decisions).
You Get
Money (cash + equity)
Growth (skill compounding, scope, network)
Autonomy (decision space), stability (predictability).
Everything else—snacks, slogans, swag—is optional. If your equation nets positive, stay and ship. If it goes negative for long enough, exit. That clarity ends most culture angst.
Incentives Beat Slogans
If you want to know what a company really values, don’t read the values page. Inspect:
Performance packets: What gets highlighted at promotion time? Delivery, quality, customer wins, cost?
Calendar & budget: Where time and money go is the real strategy.
Calibration stories: Which trade-offs were celebrated vs. penalized?
When incentives and slogans disagree, incentives win. Align your work accordingly.
Hierarchy Without Drama
Hierarchy simply assigns decision rights.
You don’t have to love everything about it, just learn to navigate it. Here are some things I have learnt
Map 3 decision-makers whose “yes” unlocks your work.
Learn their acceptance criteria (metrics, risks, optics).
Deliver in their language (brief, specific, time-bound).
This is interface design for humans.
Find Peace With Angle-Shift
When you feel sidelined or unheard, pause:
Name the purpose: “I’m here to practice my craft and ship outcomes.”
Pick a lever: Improve one team norm you can influence (review SLAs, runbook quality, rollout safety, build speed).
Let go of the rest: If it’s not your lever, stop paying a mental tax on it.
(Gita, translated to work): you control your actions, not the fruits. Do the right work well; detach from the outcome fixation.
Three Clear Exit Triggers
These three triggers work for me; adapt them to fit your own deal.
Deal Breach: Pay, scope, or role changed in a way that breaks your written equation.
Growth Stall: Six months with no skill compounding or scope evolution despite credible effort.
Trust Debt: Repeated commitments broken by your chain of command with no remediation.
Hit two of three? Stop negotiating with gravity.
What To Say Instead of Fighting Culture
Use crisp, non-theatrical language:
In 1:1: “Here’s the business outcome, the risk, and the small bet to test it this sprint. Approve?”
In a thread: “Decision proposal: target metric, guardrails, rollback. If no objections by EOD, I’ll ship.”
When values collide with reality: “Our value says X, current incentive is Y. I’ll optimize for Y unless we realign the target.”
Minimalist Frameworks You Can Use Today
Control Ledger:
This is one way to map control vs. influence. Adjust the buckets to reflect your role and org reality.Control: code, docs, design, tests, rollout plans
Influence: team norms, review standards, alert thresholds
Accept or Exit: org design, comp bands, annual planning
One-Bet Rule: Make one high-odds improvement every two to four weeks (faster build, safer deploy, clearer runbook). Track wins; they always compound baby. Frequency and scope can flex, the point is to set a sustainable cadence.
Decision Snapshot (D-SNAP): problem → options → chosen trade-off → metric → rollback. 5 bullets, 5 minutes, archived in the ticket. Use this skeleton or modify it; the value is in making trade-offs explicit.
Actionable steps (do these in the next 48 hours)
Write your Employment Equation (one page). Be specific on give/get.
Audit incentives: Grab your last perf review, last two sprints, and your org or team or manager’s goals or all of the above, it’s up to you. Note the top three real success signals.
Pick one lever you fully control. Ship a visible improvement within 14 days.
Draft a D-SNAP for your next decision. Share it before bikeshedding starts.
Set exit criteria (using the three triggers). Put dates on them.
Direct challenge
For the next two weeks, stop debating culture entirely. Instead, publish one D-SNAP per week and ship one improvement that moves a metric your customers, team or managers actually care about. If your equation still nets negative by a date you set today, stop rationalizing—plan your stay.