As you can see, one of those awards is for the Best Engineering Team. That’s not surprising when you consider how much thought is put into the hiring process and cultivating the company culture at RingCentral. Believing in your engineers and providing them with training, support and resources are universally beneficial practices you can apply to your business. Tobias Lütke, founder and CEO of Shopify, firmly believes in the Dev Degree program; it offers a great learning environment for young engineers, and many of them choose to stay at the company. Efficiency is also an important element of the engineering culture at Google.
What is a strong work culture?
Strong workplace cultures generally emphasize open and effective communication above all else. Your organization ought to be a space in which people feel comfortable communicating ideas, thoughts, opinions, you name it. Fostering free-flowing, open communication is a must for any organization.
This is especially true for any fast-moving, high-growth startup when you’re trying new things and constantly evolving. When I joined Opendoor last year, I saw that execution was a key component of our culture. And even now, as a public company, our engineering team still operates this way. We don’t always know all the information ahead of time, so iterations are crucial.
Build the right software abstractions.
They developed standardized coding conventions that contribute to that goal. Although the company has firm values, it still invests in engineers and looks for additional ways to improve the culture. A tweet from Patrick Collison, one of the company’s founders, illustrates that point well. However, the company doesn’t just pile responsibilities onto its engineers and leave them to their own devices. Developers at Netflix have their own productivity engineers who help them focus on their work. At the core of their engineering culture are freedom and responsibility.
Get this right, and developers won’t burn out or get endlessly frustrated. Companies that get this right will have innovative and autonomous people thrive. Additionally, Spotify implemented an internal open source practice that enables squads to be more productive. True collaboration starts with listening and ends with understanding. And of course, they’re also clued in to the feedback across their department and the company altogether. Most businesses use a top-down structure where somebody is always in command of the person below them. And in the end, the company benefits in some way from what the employee has learned or gained.
Ready to start?
Concise but helpful comments, as well as software abstractions, do a fine job of helping engineers write clean and maintainable code. What this does mean, however, is that another software professional should be able to look at your developers’ code and get a good idea of what’s going on.
- Do people feel safe being themselves and voicing their opinions, even if they might disagree with others?
- Although each musician plays a different instrument, they all listen to each other and focus on the same song, which works for the company’s success.
- Join over 12,000 others, and learn how to start spending your time on what matters most.
- I personally find team bonding events — like offsites, hackathons and learning programs — to be invaluable.
- That means that they give engineers a high level of autonomy and freedom to organize their work in the way the developers see fit.
- For example, you can create different channels on Slack where people will connect and interact in meaningful ways outside of regular meetings.
- And even now, as a public company, our engineering team still operates this way.
Or even better, on your next production release, organize a virtual party and ask everyone to grab their favorite drink and celebrate. People in your company must feel a sense of respect and appreciation for one another. They need to trust that their coworkers and engineering managers want what’s best for them and are transparent with both good and bad news. On the last one, common-sense flexibility, some might wonder why I’m adding it here. It’s because flexible work arrangement for software engineers are everywhere. There is an explosion of remote roles, WFH is mainstream since Coronavirus and any company that’s hanging on to the 9-to-5 or something similar will find themselves being a minority. And people at these places will ask why they wouldn’t change somewhere else where this kind of flexibility is present.
Quality
In other words, if an engineer makes a mistake, the company doesn’t blame them but the process. It’s imperative to fix the problem, not punish the person, as Sally Lait puts it. They believe that diversity is key to making better product decisions; a group that’s too homogenous can have a narrow viewpoint. Standardization improves consistency, and that’s a real advantage in companies of every size. There are over a dozen style guidesand other helpful documents and rules for developers; below is one for using Python. Given the number of technologies and tools engineers use at Google, that resource can be invaluable to new hires.
They’ve built Codelabs, where they store all the training documents and resources a developer at Google might need. It also contains exercises and tutorials for developers to get used to processes. Hunger for improvement and problem-solving can inspire engineers of any company, including yours, so taking a leaf from Stripe’s book is something you might want to consider. As they point out, they believe in performance management and feedback, but career paths are not rigid—which doesn’t mean they don’t care.
Netflix engineering culture
You can use Google as an inspiration for many things, so, unsurprisingly, its engineering culture is also something to aspire to. Unfortunately, many tech companies overlook the sense of purpose employees crave. Consequently, employees are left feeling like they’re just working for a paycheck and aren’t contributing to anything greater than themselves. Things are going slow, communication is bad, teams are not in sync, and bosses do micromanagement.
Nick’s article is packed with good ideas for maintaining your engineering culture. If you think you have one and want to keep it please realize that doing so requires vigilance with every hire, review, promotion, and product decision. This is a person who, for fun, proposes solutions to the world’s gigantic problems. He makes enormous efforts and then just says, “Here is a massive amount of data. ” I don’t have to have worked at any of his companies to know what values are held at the top.
There Are 4 Key Elements to a Strong Engineering Culture
In almost every job description for a software developer or engineer, you’ll find that employers are looking for clean and maintainable code. Project management in software developmentplays a crucial role in team coordination and morale. Rely on customer feedback to make frequent changes to the software product. Managing a remote teamor dragging your feet into a physical office every day, software development looks the same on both ends. Some projects are ones you know you need to do — such as projects related to trust and safety — while others are big bets you can go for.
