You didn’t build culture. You built chaos.
Slack isn’t a strategy—how tech teams replaced execution with emoji
Emoji-based governance and weekly Zoom karaoke don’t equate agility.
The modern tech org doesn’t run on roadmaps. It runs on vibes. And no one wants to admit how badly it's broken.
Let’s get one thing straight: replacing seasoned professionals with Slack comedians and Notion aesthetes doesn’t make you more collaborative. It makes you ungovernable.
You didn’t democratize your culture. You infantilized it.
How it started
Remember when flat orgs were the holy grail? When “empowered teams” and “async-first” were going to save us from meetings and middle management?
We were told hierarchy was the enemy. That culture needed to be “bottom-up.” That psychological safety would lead us to product-market enlightenment.
Instead, we got this:
Decisions by emoji reaction.
“Alignment” meetings where nothing gets decided.
Six people rewriting the same Miro board while production burns.
Culture became a lifestyle brand. Not a set of principles.
And leadership let it happen—because they were too scared of being labeled “top-down” to actually lead.
How it’s going
Ask any staff engineer what it’s like now. Go ahead.
They’ll tell you they spend half their week navigating team rituals invented by people who’ve never shipped anything harder than a newsletter. They’re told to “bring their whole selves to work” but get flagged for being “too assertive” if they challenge groupthink.
They’ll tell you that the real work gets done quietly, off-Slack, by the same three people who carry the org while everyone else drafts a new “cultural initiative.”
Meanwhile, junior employees are being promoted for enthusiasm over execution. They moderate retros, host lunch-and-learns on “emotional scaffolding,” and build internal decks about “cross-functional trust dynamics” with more moodboard than metrics.
And when deadlines slip, it’s not their fault—it’s “collective ownership.”
Let me translate that: no one is responsible, and nothing is learned.
The devaluation of expertise
Real expertise is messy. It pushes back. It demands tradeoffs.
But messy is no longer welcome in the culture deck. The modern tech org doesn’t want experts—it wants vibe-affirmers. People who say yes, nod on Zoom, and drop a fire emoji to “celebrate small wins.”
So senior engineers either shut up or walk out.
Operators get labeled “rigid.”
Anyone asking for accountability is “not collaborative enough.”
This isn’t agility. This is entropy wrapped in Canva.
You turned culture into a UX project
Let’s stop pretending this is about inclusion or flexibility.
This is about a deep unwillingness to deal with tension, hierarchy, or leadership.
What used to be cultural scaffolding—rituals, norms, shared values—has become a fetishized interface. You’ve built a workplace that’s intuitive to navigate but impossible to govern.
Everyone knows how to contribute a Loom. No one knows who owns the roadmap.
Culture isn’t a wallpaper. It’s how decisions get made when things get hard.
And right now, most tech orgs have no mechanism for that. Just a sea of feel-good rituals with no spine underneath.
Want to fix it?
Stop hiring for enthusiasm. Start hiring for judgment.
Give actual leaders—not just culture stewards—the authority to draw boundaries, make tradeoffs, and say no.
Kill the “culture as vibes” model. Replace it with culture as ops.
Culture should clarify ownership. Shorten decision loops. Reward rigor.
If it doesn’t, it’s not culture—it’s a costume party with burnouts and churn hidden under the glitter.
And if your company’s identity collapses the moment you cut back on happy hours or swag budgets, maybe it never had one to begin with.
Postscript for the true believers:
Yes, culture matters.
But not like this.
You don’t build resilient teams by coddling ambiguity and weaponizing wellness.
You build them by telling the truth, setting the bar, and leading with backbone.
Everything else is just theater.