No other quesiton gets asked more by engineers than this one. It’s generally before money, location, hybrid and all that good stuff.
And I think that in general they’re used to hearing things like. “Oh it’s really collaborative.” “Quality matters.” or, “They move fast.”
But I don’t think that’s really what people are asking. They’re asking something much more specific: how does the actual work happen? Not only, what work happens’?
The specifics matter more than the statements.
- Not “we value quality” but, “there’s no QA team so we all write our own tests.”
- Not “we’re agile” but, “pull requests need two approvals before they merge.”
- Not “we move fast” but, “we ship and maintain our own code.”
Specifics tell you what a team actually values, not what they say they value.
I was listening to an excellent conversation between Dave Farley , Emily Bache and Daniel Terhorst-North recently about scaling engineering culture. Dan made a point that culture is essentially just a set of behavioural patterns under system constraints. Therefore, if you want to influence culture, you have to change system constraints.
On the face if it, that sounds academic, but it’s actually really practical. Your culture isn’t your values poster. It’s what people do when they’re not sure what to do. It’s the decisions that get made when you’re not in the room.
From a Reddit thread about engineering culture, someone listed three things that they cared about in a software team.
- Can I tell if my work matters? Not in some abstract “we’re changing the world” way. Can I see that what I shipped is being used by real people? Do I know if it’s working? In that same conversation, they talked about how important it is for engineers to understand how their code impacts the business and customers. It moves you closer to the product, helps you empathise with customers, helps you take ownership.
- Can I do work I’m proud of? That doesn’t mean perfect code. It means having enough time to do things properly. Not cutting corners that’ll bite you in three months. Someone in a Reddit thread about engineering culture put it perfectly: “The process should work for us. We should not work for the process.” Too often, people feel like process is the tail wagging the dog.
- Do my teammates care? About the code, about the product, about each other? Are people trying to learn and get better, or just going through the motions? Another comment from that Reddit thread: “A team that cares about productivity and constant learning defines a good software engineering culture.” Simple, but that’s it.
For early stage companies, this seems to matter more than most founders realise.
When you’re trying to find product market fit, you need to move fast and change direction constantly. That’s impossible if your team doesn’t trust each other or if everyone’s working completely differently. You need people who’ll happily throw away a week’s work when the data says you’re going the wrong direction. That requires trust. You can’t build trust by accident.
In the conversation with Dave, Emily and Dan, they talked about how to get behavioural change. Dan mentioned some research (I need to track down the source) about how you don’t think your way to a new way of acting, you act your way to a new way of thinking.
In other words, you start doing the thing you want to be able to do. You’ll be rubbish at it at first. But as you get better at it, your brain shifts and it becomes habit. Once it becomes habit, it’s parked in a different part of your brain and you can learn the next thing.
I think that’s how culture actually changes. Not through posters or statements, but through consistent behaviour that becomes habit.
The companies that seem to struggle least with hiring can describe how work happens in concrete terms. They’ve made some deliberate decisions about how they work together. Not elaborate frameworks, just clarity on what good looks like.
Things like: When do we write tests? What needs to be reviewed and what doesn’t? How do we decide what to work on? What do we do when something breaks in production?
Karl Wiegers, in an article about building healthy engineering cultures, described culture as “a set of shared values, goals, and principles that guide the behaviours, activities, priorities, and decisions of a group of people working toward a common objective.” In short: how we do things around here, how we work together, and what we think is important.
The companies getting this right haven’t done anything revolutionary. They’ve just been deliberate about a few basic things. They’ve decided what matters and then focused on that behaiour.
For smaller companies that we’ll be competing against larger ones for engineering talent. There’s a real opportunity that’s cost-effective, in describing and showing your engineering culture and using that as a talent attraction tool.
You can do this obviously on your careers page, like this one, and also use it as part of your outreach to potential candidates when you’re planning hiring.
I don’t know that any of this is hugely complicated. But it does require some thinking, discussing, planning, and articulating.
Your engineering culture is happening whether you’re thinking about it or not. The question is whether you’re shaping it deliberately or letting it form by accident.
If you made it this far, congrats, and no doubt you’ll probably be interested in that Podcast episode that I mentioned at the top.
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