Ask HN: Role-model companies with the best dev culture in 2023
What are the role-model software companies with amazing dev culture now?
In 2013-15 many people were looking up to how Netflix or Spotify built their dev culture and how they operated and developed their products.
What companies are setting current trends now (in 2022-23)?
EDIT: I know that 'amazing culture' can mean different things to different people. I'm interested in examples of the companies that are setting the current trends how development should be done. Structure of teams, CI/CD, pipelines, responsibilities, tooling, day-to-day working methodology (product management probably too).
Of course this judgement is subjective - I'm fine with that.
72 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadSomething like:
- you don't get paged when things break
- it's possible to ship to production within, say, a month
- there's a sane CI system in place
- there's no product owner between you and the customer
- at least partially remote working is OK
(@op perhaps you could clarify what would qualify as amazing culture? I suspect the bar is higher than the above)
I would have killed for a Product Owner to shield me from that!
In digital health setting I’ve met a few drs-turn-pms who were excellent because they could translate between what drs wanted and what engineering was thinking in a way that swe-turn-pm would struggle. Of course, the best dr pm I know also learned how to program in python because he enjoyed it (and he even shipped some small self-contained projects!).
The least effective pm I met was a non-dr non-swe who didn’t have deep understanding of either side and essentially tried to apply general pm-principles-from-a-book. But even they were positive value after a quarter of finding their place.
they do need to know the product inside out, and who the customers are, and why the product evolved like it did. They need to be able to advocate for the customer.
- we have an event based architecture based on per customer queues, I haven't been paged in months mostly because single customer issues don't cause pages (just tickets which are handled during working hours)
- I regularly ship to prod multiple times a day. I just finished a complete overhaul of our search in about a month.
- Our CI is pretty good for a startup, certainly has the most room for improvement on this list
- as a startup you get to directly talk to customers as much as you want
- I'm fully remote, but we have regular company offsites together
- regularly do lunch and learns to share knowledge
Of course this judgement is subjective - I'm fine with that.
https://www.flywheelsoftware.com/post/why-flywheel
„As we value the Learner’s Mindset, we use the squad model so everyone gets to sharpen their skills, constantly and work on new things and work with different people.” ?
plus how does the „solid feedback process up and down” work?
I (an American) was temporarily living in Argentina. They wanted to pay me in Argentina pesos (that have a 20% inflation at the time, but currently around 50%). I mentioned how I plan on returning home to SF. The pay band was less than what I made at a seed-stage startup.
Well .. yes? If you were Japanese in the US would you expect to be paid in Yen? It’s not like you were working for them in the US and they sent you as an expat. I’m sure they would have switched you to USD had you moved to SF
I mentioned that Argentina has 20% inflation and locally businesses provide salary increases every 3-6 mo. They told me salaries are adjusted annually.
I don't remember their exact response when I talked about me returning to my residence in San Francisco.
People may move around and have financial obligations in multiple countries. E.g., if you have a mortgage and school loans in the US, and you want to live in Armenia for 1 year, your employer insisting that you take a 80% paycut due to "Armenian rates" is pretty ignorant and inflexible.
1/ I was on a tourist visa. I did not have a bank account that could accept pesos.
2/ if I had an arg account, the gov limits how much can be sold for usd. [0]
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2019/10/28/argentinas-...
Official interannual inflation rate was 94,8% in December 2022.
https://www.indec.gob.ar/uploads/informesdeprensa/ipc_01_238...
We're already starting to see examples of these differences in the thread started by @JonChesterfield; I'm sure others will pop up.
The only conclusion I can draw so far is that interviewing the employer remains as important as ever. Don't just write off a company because of what you see online, just have a 30 minute chat.
I'm a big fan of both aiming to deliver value (by having a value hypothesis for each new thing) and making sure we're delivering value. But actually quantifying it can be tricky. Do you mainly use value proxies here? E.g., X people are using the feature Y times per week?
For me, it's enough to be able to explain the potential customer value. And this often happens after the fact. We actually try to get people here to listen to their gut and do small versions of work, _then_ tell the story of why it might matter.
Are you me?
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...
10 years ago there was a huge focus on structuring engineering teams in ways that made it so that individual engineers did not matter. There were also tons of dependencies between teams as you would have "Systems Engineers", "Devops Engineers", "DBAs", "Data Scientists" etc. etc.
Web work was also relatively new, and few leaders actually had a handle on how much time things would take. Functional splits lead to teams making poor assumptions on other team's efforts, and agile produced cancerously bad software cultures.
My experience in 2023 is that few teams maintain any agile concepts outside of daily stand-ups/weekly syncs. Teams are generally functionally integrated, and have a more or less date oriented culture depending on how annual goals are set and how you make commitments to customers. Cloud computing, improved test infrastructure/expectations, CI/CD, and maturity have dramatically changed development culture industry wide.
Is this an a-typical experience? I can't think of the last time I saw a project with a date that the engineer hadn't set.
Web work was new 10 years ago?? What am I missing here? I've been doing almost exclusively web work for 20 years now.
Few leaders still have any kind of handle on how long things will take. Nor engineers or PMs, etc.
And agile produced cancerous bad software culture? Clearly you have way different experiences than I do. Unless by agile you mean top down corporate scrummerfall bullshit, then yes.
I find generally complexity is increasing, tooling is a bit better. Culture is backsliding to 90s bullshit, and the upper level situation hasn't evolved in any way. Over all I'm pretty disappointed by the state of the industry and the "worse is better" tendencies except in a few outlier areas. But maybe that's how these things go.
New in relative terms 10 years ago, the vast majority of leadership teams came from non-web software. Alternately, if they came from web software - they were going from writing landing pages to complex SaaS products. I rarely encounter people in leadership who haven't spent the majority of their career building web services/software which runs on the web at this point.
> And agile produced cancerous bad software culture?
Aye - My experience with agile teams was that the sprint structure took precedence over the customers, business stakeholders, and product. Engineers either got burned out because estimates came in low - or crap was shipped to hit the sprint deadline. Ironically if something new came up, rather than handling the new thing in an agile way - customers would get berated for not filling in acceptance criteria, or not putting enough detail in the acceptance criteria, or not sacrificing under the full moon in the acceptance criteria etc.
I spent the last 8 years avoiding agile shops, and I am pleased to see that there are fewer of them every year. I vastly prefer treating software engineers like any other professional engineering discipline where you assign a project to an engineer, let the engineer scope and design the project, then execute on the project.
In fact that sounds straight up dysfunctional. I've certainly worked in a few agile (to varying degrees) that functioned far better than that. To me they've been the only places that we're halfway decent.
They were outnumbered by places that either paid lip service to Agile (universally using SCRUM), or applied it in some backwards bizarre way. I think this is where that bad rep comes from.
It's a shame, I've personally worked with an onsite customer that was a C level exec, and we cut out reams of red tape, got stuff done, and delighted them. Maybe the real vision of it is just to hard to achieve given political realities and the shitty nature of the modern corporation.
I doubt we're setting trends. It's just a lovely place to work. https://www.aha.io/
And even if you found an amazing team, all it takes is one re-org for the team to be ruined.
[0] https://handbook.airbyte.com/
[1] https://posthog.com/handbook
edit: addendums
I had one of their in-house recruiters work hard to get me into their company, and was kind of happy until it came to the reference checks, nobody had mentioned to me that they would be hiring a 3rd party company that was going to contact 7 years of previous employers. For some people this might be the norm, for me that's MASSIVE overkill.
A couple of years later someone on twitter was claiming that Gitlab's hiring process was transparent so I mentioned the problem, and they opened a public issue.
A month later I checked to see how it was progressing and they'd decided to make it private and I was definitely not allowed to see anything about it.
I've since noted in their materials that they explicitly mention the check, and it's 5 years worth, which is much better from a transparency point of view, but disappointing from a - I had to go and check their documents to discover a change had been made, point of view.
1. They want you to ship like a startup: https://handbook.airbyte.com/company/methodology#done-better...
2. They are remote but will adjust your salary based on location: https://handbook.airbyte.com/people/compensation#nomading
3. They are transparent but there is no mention of salaries.
4. They support diversity more than the French republic (aka: tons of BS): https://handbook.airbyte.com/people/diversity-inclusion-and-...
5. They'll give you $100 on your birthday!! https://handbook.airbyte.com/people/expense-policy#birthdays
Building these books in the open is signalling. No one knows except, of course, for the people who have gone through whether that guideline is legit or not.
Wasn’t sure if it’d be for me at first, as it’s so different from where I was before. Previous company I was at, great social culture (pre-COVID), very nice people, but very top down decision making. Also nobody ever got let go (or even really talked to) for performance reasons, very easy place to coast. Some people referred to the culture as “toxic positivity”, which is a pretty good description. Really, the only way people got let go was at mass layoffs every 2 years or so, but between layoff people could dog it and nobody would say anything. Overall it was socially fun, but work wise extremely slow, inefficient and bureaucratic. I have lots of good memories from that place, but I don’t think it was an EFFECTIVE company culture.
At my current, “Netflix inspired culture” company, there’s a lot less process, a lot more personal responsibility, and an expectation of high performance. People who aren’t contributing enough are quickly told, and if they can’t turn it around, let go. I thought it might feel too harsh/cold for me, but I actually really like the culture. Low process, high productivity, and you can trust basically all your teammates to be high quality contributors and decision makers. I feel more pride in my team and what we’re building. Social aspects are definitely not as fun as at my last co., but I do think a fair bit of that is the post-COVID world, hard to have a really social/fun company culture when most people are remote most of the time.
Generally I’ve found them to be smallish companies with a track record of growth (“uninterrupted prosperity”) and a culture that values the holistic good (i.e. has buried the exclusive focus on shareholders) and comes from the top.
It doesn't seem to be updated very often though with resources so I am collecting a static list of such companies in case anyone is interested to explore. Obviously it won't fit across the bill but some of the criteria:
- Product-led
- Known for excellent engineering culture
- Outcome oriented
- Remote
- Invest in professional development
- Neither chaotic or beauracratic
- Sustainable & profitable