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This blog is based on Nigel Kirsten's presentation "Platforms and frameworks eat culture for breakfast" from SymfonyCon 2024. Kirsten is Chief Product Officer at Upsun. We utilized AI tools for transcription and to enhance the structure and clarity of the content.
At SymfonyCon 2024, Nigel Kirsten, Chief Product Officer at Platform.sh, shared a simple but sharp idea: the tools we choose do not just support our work. They shape how we work together. Pick the right platforms and frameworks, and you can nudge a team toward better habits without a single “culture program.”
Peter Drucker, the management guru famous for his organizational insights, once said that "culture eats strategy for breakfast." His point was simple but profound: no matter how brilliant your strategy, if your organizational culture can't execute it, you'll fail.
Kirsten builds on this idea with a modern twist. In today's software-driven world, he argues that "platforms and frameworks eat culture for breakfast." The technology choices we make as developers don't just affect our code; they fundamentally shape how our organizations work, collaborate, and evolve.
Management thinker Peter Drucker made “culture eats strategy for breakfast” famous. Nigel agrees that culture is critical. What is different today is the power of software. Our tools shape our daily tasks, our handoffs, and our sense of ownership. Choose well, and you change how teams plan, test, deploy, and learn.
To understand how technology influences culture, we must first recognize the various types of organizational cultures that exist. Ron Westrum's research identifies three primary types:
When developers complain about organizational culture, they're usually expressing frustration that their workplace doesn't operate as a generative culture.
The statistics on organizational change are sobering. While popular business wisdom claims that 70% of change management initiatives fail, the reality is more nuanced. The original research suggested that 50-70% of organizations fail to achieve the dramatic results they seek, a significant difference from outright failure, but still concerning.
Kirsten's experience consulting with various organizations confirms these challenges. Most culture change programs fail because they focus on only one aspect of what researchers call "socio-technical systems."
Every organization that uses technology operates as a socio-technical system with four interdependent components:
Changes in any one area create ripple effects across all others. When you adopt new technology, it changes what tasks are possible. New tasks require individuals to acquire a diverse range of skills. These changes often necessitate adjustments to organizational structure.
This interconnectedness explains why culture change programs that focus solely on "people issues" or "technical solutions" typically fall short. Successful transformation requires understanding and addressing all four components simultaneously.
The rise of containerization technology provides a perfect example of how technical choices drive organizational transformation. Before containers, most large organizations maintained strict separation between development and operations teams. Developers wrote code and handed it over to operations teams for deployment, a process that often created bottlenecks and friction.
Containers changed this dynamic dramatically. Suddenly, developers could package their applications in a way that made deployment much more straightforward. This wasn't just a technical improvement; it was a fundamental shift in organizational power and responsibility.
"The big change that containers made was that suddenly devs could take on responsibilities in an organization that previously had to be done by the operations team," Kirsten explains. "In most companies, there were more devs than there were operations people, so this essentially democratized the process of deployment."
The results were profound. The traditional system administrator role largely disappeared, replaced by infrastructure engineers who were essentially software developers specializing in operational concerns. Many large organizations literally restructured their teams, reducing operations staff while hiring more developers.
This transformation couldn't have been predicted solely from the technical specifications of container technology. The cultural and organizational changes emerged from the practical implications of how the technology was used.
Understanding why technology choices matter for culture requires acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: humans are imperfect information-processing machines. We're subject to numerous cognitive biases that influence how we make decisions and adapt to change.
Kirsten highlights several biases that are particularly relevant to software teams:
These biases aren't character flaws; they're part of human nature. But they do make certain types of organizational change more difficult, particularly when that change involves abandoning existing work or approaches.
Understanding these psychological realities helps explain why thoughtful technology choices can be so powerful. Good platforms and frameworks can work with human nature rather than against it.
Kirsten analyzed Symfony through this lens and found several attributes that promote a healthy organizational culture:
These technical features create organizational affordances, making certain types of collaboration easier and more natural.
Technology choices can also drive undesirable cultural changes. Kirsten shared his own experience from the early 2000s, when the immediate feedback loop of PHP development led him into problematic patterns.
"I could edit files directly on a server via SFTP and suddenly they were there," he recalls. While this immediacy felt powerful, it created several organizational problems. The lack of formal processes meant no one else on his team felt comfortable making changes to his code. Testing happened in production. He became a single point of failure, unable to take vacations and ultimately burning out.
The problem wasn't PHP itself, but rather the lack of organizational affordances in his development setup. The technology made certain things easy (rapid deployment) while making others difficult (collaboration, testing, knowledge sharing).
Long-term support (LTS) versions exemplify another instance of how technical decisions create organizational trade-offs. While LTS releases provide stability for large customers, they can also slow innovation by removing the pressure to stay current with updates.
For individual developers and team leads, Kirsten offers concrete advice for using technology choices to improve organizational culture:
If you want shared responsibility for testing, don't just talk about it build it into your infrastructure. Create CI/CD pipelines for every new project, even if they start empty. Make it trivially easy for someone to add a test when they find a bug.
If you want fluid team membership, invest in consistency. Use linting tools, style guides, and shared frameworks that make it easier for developers to move between different parts of the codebase.
If you want visibility across the organization, build observability into your service frameworks from the outset. Don't make monitoring and logging an afterthought; make them automatic consequences of deploying new services.
The key principle is to create "walking skeletons", basic infrastructure that makes good practices the path of least resistance, instead of requiring developers to remember to do the right thing, make the right thing the default.
For engineering leaders, the message is equally important: pay attention to the technology choices your teams are making. These decisions aren't just technical—they're shaping the culture of your organization, whether you realize it or not.
Look at your technology roadmap through a cultural lens. Ask questions like:
The goal isn't to micromanage technical decisions, but to understand their broader implications and ensure they align with the organizational culture you're trying to build.
One of Kirsten's most practical pieces of advice is to stop talking about "culture" as an abstract concept. Culture often feels too broad and intangible for individual contributors to influence directly.
Instead, focus on specific, actionable organizational dynamics. Rather than saying "we need better culture," identify concrete problems: "We need better cooperation between the frontend and backend teams," or "We need to reduce the time it takes to get feedback on new features."
These specific problems can often be addressed through thoughtful technology choices combined with process improvements.
The relationship between technology and organizational culture is complex and often unpredictable. We couldn't have foreseen how smartphones would enable ride-sharing services that would change urban transportation, or how social media would transform the travel industry through influencer culture.
Similarly, the full organizational implications of our technology choices often only become clear in retrospect. But this unpredictability doesn't mean we're powerless. By understanding the principles of socio-technical systems and human psychology, we can make more informed choices about the platforms and frameworks we adopt.
As developers, we're not helpless observers of organizational culture; we're active participants in shaping it. Every time we choose a framework, set up a deployment pipeline, or design an API, we're influencing how our organizations work.
The question isn't whether our technology choices will affect culture; they will, whether we think about it or not. The question is whether we'll be intentional about using these choices to create the kind of organizations we want to work in.
In a world where software continues to reshape every industry, developers who understand the relationship between technology and culture will be the ones who build not just better applications, but also better organizations. And in the end, better organizations build better software, creating a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone involved.