After 2 years working for Yahoo in London, Yahoo outsourced search to Microsoft Bing. I moved to the US to take on the role of chief architect for the Yahoo Platform, and I was faced with the problem of getting things done. Now that might seem like an obvious thing, “getting things done”, but it was not. After two months in Sunnyvale, I still could not figure out how to get any results. I was failing. I had started at Yahoo working in London responsible for Yahoo search outside of the US, as an architect, an individual contributor with no reports. Although I had no direct authority, International engineering was a relatively small group of about ~1000 engineers that had a highly strict and disciplined engineering culture that John Linwood, my boss, had brought from Microsoft. Inserting myself into that structured culture was easy. I found where the reviews happened, where to position myself so that the right decisions were made before it was too late. But Yahoo in the US lacked that engineering discipline, or at least I could not explain it. And I did not know how to navigate it. All I could do as an architect was exercise influence through “gravitas” as I had no reports. What had worked in London wasn’t working in the US.
Yet even though international engineering was structured like Microsoft, with a very robust SDLC and superb service engineering strictly adhering to ITIL, the engineering progress, the true stuff was being built in Sunnyvale. It seemed like a mess to me, but that mess was working. It was working extremely well. In fact, for over 20 years Yahoo had one of the strongest engineering teams in the Valley, and engineering was known to “bleed purple.” If you web search for “bleeding purple”, you’ll see a few articles on it. The engineering ethos was so strong that as ex-Yahoos left and founded new companies, such as Cloudera, Hortonworks, Slack, WhatsApp, … they found that this sense of purple “flowed” with them.
The Babylonian Empire is a historical anecdote in what had been so far just a number highly fragmented tribes, constantly fighting with each other over land and the scarce resources around river valleys. The Babylonian Empire was one of the first time that humanity moved from living in caves and tribes to being an organised society. A rule of law (the “code”) was developed that allowed a lineage of Emperors to rule. What makes this code unique from a socio-anthropological standpoint was that this code had evolved from a collection of tribal rules into a unified non-tribal set of rules optimising for commerce, trade, and wealth creation. The rulers found after many generations what the strengths and the weaknesses of the tribal system were and slowly mutated, like organisms, till they found a stable equilibrium of laws that brought peace and prosperity. Culture was born, some codified in law for its first time. The code succeeded because it became “ethics”. Decisions whether how to close a trade deal or who to kill where “right” and “wrong.” What tribes had previously disagreed upon, now was a shared belief. It was “obvious”, it was “the right thing to do”.
As history carries on, we see similar examples of resource optimisation, usually codified into culture through religion. Religion is a fantastic tool that societies developed to defend what they found as right and wrong, the shared values, beliefs and behaviours of a society, what makes them unique, are usually captured first through religion, and later on secularised. Not killing those that steal from us, or having multiple concubines, is not something we learnt from God. It was something we humans defined to optimise for our wealth, peace, security, etc. but did that in the form of religion and law, because we collectively agreed it was the right thing to do, and over time it become “the meaning of the law” and informed our “ethical principles.”
Kings and Emperors tried over centuries to define their own rules, and change culture to their own will. None succeeded. Even the British Monarchy, one of the oldest surviving in the world, went through difficult times after the Middle Ages, with the Puritans that ended in the English Civil War. The Monarchy lost most of its powers and the country started to evolve into the first democracy in the world with more power transferred over time to the Prime Minister and Parliament. The King had been useful as a figure to bring all the Lords together and unify the country in periods of crisis (externally and internally), but as commerce, and a buoyant bourgeoise, grew, the optimisation failed. The code that was earlier right, stopped being right.
Cultures evolve and adapt, just like animals mutate to the demands of the environment. Human societies are no different in that respect from any other living organism. What works in one environment may not work in any other. But through history, all cultures share most of the same traits: they are an optimisation at a point in time for a number of socio-anthropological problems, they always optimise for the resources available, they always use law to codify culture, whether that’s through code of law or religion, they always see law and religion beliefs living outside of religion, and they all develop ethics about what’s right and wrong. The tools of culture are therefore law, rituals, ceremonies, shaming, celebration, … all things we do together as a society reinforces (or weakens) the sense of culture.
What did Yahoo have in the US that I did not see? Yahoo International Engineering had a very explicit culture, structured top down, and extremely strict. This was necessary since there were groups across many countries, without much human contact, and it was easy to see them steering away from each other without constant supervision. A top-down authority was accepted as the only means for success, to control chaos. But Yahoo in the US was a very cohesive culture, one that did not need a strict top-down approach. In fact it rejected structure, as a barrier for developing prowess (a word that at Yahoo reflects on engineers pride). The code for Yahoo International Engineering did not work in the US. And all the rituals and ceremonies I was used to were not working for me.
Yahoo in the US was a meritocracy, an extreme culture of pride and honour. Engineers did not optimise to get things done (just) on time. They showed off constantly about their prowess in the form of libraries, code, releases, properties, … It was like everybody was competing to be the best engineer in the company. Juniors looked up to seniors to learn their trade. Yahoo was a school of craftsmanship. Hadoop was not an extremely structured project. Eric14 was coding 24x7 and people admired him and Doug. That was the culture. And the only way to make progress in this culture was to be admired through code.
But just like what I knew from Yahoo International Engineering did not work in Yahoo US, or like Kings failed but Priests succeeded, culture is made to fit the needs of a society. Now WE need OUR view of the world, from the Nexar engineer point of view. What do we belief in? How do we make it explicit? How do we celebrate it? What rituals do we need? How do we shame those that violate those beliefs? That’s how culture is made.