For Who?

2025 marks my 10-year anniversary of working in tech.
 In that time, I’ve worn the hats of software engineer, product manager, founder, sales rep, and support person — working alongside an eclectic cast of characters. All of them held different expectations for what makes a great workplace.

One of the biggest thought errors I’ve seen — in tech and in life — is the belief that there’s an objective “best” or “optimum” way to do anything. People search endlessly for the best management style, the best morning routine, the best diet.
 
The error isn’t in wanting to improve — it’s in detaching oneself from the exercise. When you remove the human doing the thing from the equation, you lose the most important ingredient in understanding what outcomes are actually desirable.

Humans are messy, so we pretend they’re fixed, predictable inputs in our tidy mental models. The result? Bad models that work for almost no one but sound good on podcasts.

A book that first sparked this idea for me was Ray Dalio’s Principles. In it, he describes Bridgewater’s work culture, which — by most contemporary standards — would be labeled toxic, overbearing, even unsustainable.

While admittedly leaning into stereotypes, I think it’s safe to say the average person would leave Bridgewater after a few months with a bruised sense of confidence and an urgent desire to post a traumatic Glassdoor review about verbal abuse.

But that’s the point. Bridgewater isn’t for the average person — it’s for Bridgewater people. The culture isn’t designed to include those who don’t fit. It’s designed to filter for those who will thrive.

That culture isn’t “right” or “wrong.” It’s just Bridgewater. And as soon as we try to label it as one or the other, we have to introduce the missing context: right or wrong for who?

Over the years, I’ve seen many companies and communities attempt to engineer “culture” from a principled or empirical standpoint — as if there were universal rights and wrongs for human behavior. Ironically, these efforts are usually framed as humanistic, when they’re often completely divorced from the actual people that make up the tribe.

Culture isn’t about virtue. It’s about fit. The healthiest teams aren’t the ones chasing moral correctness — they’re the ones honest enough to define who they’re for, and disciplined enough to stop pretending they can be for everyone.