Irrespective of what a company's leadership says about its culture, priorities, or expectations for how people will work with each other, the structures put in place in a workplace create a set of rules for "winning," or maximizing the benefit to oneself or one's group. Especially if the employees hired are reasonably intelligent, they will always deduce the way to operate within the system while optimizing whatever outcomes they consider beneficial. In this way, working within an organization is like playing a game -- One whose rules must be discovered through word of mouth and experimentation. When these rules encourage behavior consistent with the company's goals, the result is synergy, consistency, and alignment. When they don't, the result is cynicism, friction, and misalignment.

In this talk, Roy demonstrates the power of this alignment (or lack thereof) using real-world examples from previous and current employer, with specific emphasis on his experience introducing Python to production use within Netflix, the organizational structures he interacted with through that process, and the way they tie into Netflix's formal culture.

Attendees of this talk will be able to examine the structures within their own organization and assess how they reinforce -- or conflict with -- their stated culture, and will have the opportunity to be more thoughtful about the impact of organizational rules and changes on their company's culture.