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Building an Engineering Culture from scratch?

5 points by Nilef ↗ HN
I work for a BigCo (close to 100K employees) who recently decided to stop outsourcing all of their development efforts to India and to start building teams of engineers, moving towards Cloud, api-first thinking and other modcons.

As part of my new role in this structure, I'm tasked with helping build out an engineering team. From spending a lot of time on HN, my biggest concern is making sure a culture that prioritises customers outcomes, developer experience and fast delivery takes hold amongst both new employees and existing employees.

So my question is - Does anyone have tips/experience/articles/books to share which might give me a head-start on building a sustainable and desirable engineering culture?

4 comments

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AnimalMuppet
Some tips, based somewhat on experience:

Hire grownups. Hire people who won't do politics, who won't harass people, who will get their work done instead of slacking, and who know (or can learn) to use the tools, languages, and techniques you think should be used.

Somebody's got to keep the BigCo bureaucracy from strangling the team's ability to get things done. If that's you, I pity you, but somebody's got to do it.

Your job includes managing both the procedures and the culture. Remember that both of these are things that you can change. "This is the way the BigCo CTO thinks the procedure should be" is not a good argument unless you've tried very hard to push back against it. (Even then, it may only be an argument that you can't do what you're trying to do in BigCo in any reasonable way, and that it's time to move on.)

If your team can in fact do fast delivery, somewhere up the reporting chain you're going to have an impedance mismatch with somebody who expects waterfall-style pacing and reporting. You're either going to have to persuade that person to let you run leaner and move faster, or else you're going to need political cover from even higher up to use against that person.

matt_the_bass
Great comment. I have $0.02 to add:

You may wish to consider writing down a mission statement / manifesto / spec on what you want for the culture. Then get some buy in from above.

Also, have you been happy at this company so far? If so, I’m hopeful you can keep it a place you’ll be happy (I.e keep it on track) If not, you probably still won’t be after this.

Good luck. I look forward to other people’s comments here too.

cimmanom
Be the culture you want to encourage.

People entering a new community (that's what your team is) typically take a couple days to feel out what the existing norms are, and will adopt those norms -- go along to get along -- as long as the norms are reasonably in line with their values.

That is, you might not get someone who wears a burqa to switch to hotpants, but you might convince her to wear a green one instead of a blue one, or to wear a baseball cap on top.

A developer who's passionate about writing provably mathematically correct software for space shuttles might have difficulty adapting to a "move fast and break things" mindset, but s/he might be willing to adjust from a waterfall process to one that involves more frequent customer feedback. Determining what sort of adjustments people are willing to make is an important part of the hiring process.

The exceptions to the "adopt existing norms" rule are people who are immature or assholes. See also AnimalMuppet's comment about hiring grownups.

Culture is least sticky at the earliest stages when there are only a few people in the existing community, and it hasn't been established for long. The more people you have in the community and the longer it's been established, the more inertia the culture has, so the personality differences of a single addition are less likely to change it significantly unless they're a truly raging asshole and you let them stomp all over people for too long.

At the beginning, be VERY careful about those first few hires. The culture they adopt will basically be the culture of your team for a very long time. You're more likely to have to spend a lot of time setting an example, speaking explicitly about the norms you want to enforce, and quietly taking people aside to correct them when they violate those norms.