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Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

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Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#3

Post by prohor »

Spotify sounds very interesting to me. But I don't work there, so cannot really tell if it really works as they describe.

https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult... https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-cult...

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#5

Post by jakozaur »

There is no universal scale. Some people prefer to work at big companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook... some at smaller fast moving startups and everything in between.

There are for sure better and worse companies in each category, but even within big companies there is huge variance and it depends what you are looking for.

Though some generic observation:

1. Product companies tends to have better culture than software consultancies.

2. Companies which got strong technical leadership and software is a key component rather than add on (e.g. some banks).

3. Good litmus test is to ask employees, do they have hackathons/educational budget/internal tech talks.

4. Another litmus test is to ask how hard is to push feature to production/release or about developer tooling. Good companies tend to have convenient tools.

Of course even those 4 points got exceptions.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#6

Post by dirtyaura »

Google has an unique software engineering culture that was built and designed by the first engineers. Many of the practices show deep understanding of the challenges that growing an engineering culture faces.

A few examples:

There are clearly defined initiation rites for new employees that make them familiar with the engineering practices.

Focus is on a few key languages (C++, Java, Javascript, Python, Go) and code reviews are practiced over the team boundaries. This makes the knowledge transfer inside the company faster.

Changing your team and role regularly is encouraged.

Single, company-wide code tree and build system makes it easy to switch teams and make it possible to build very efficient tooling.

Coding style is strictly enforced to avoid petty fights and Google's very good coding styles guides include reasoning why certain choices were made.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#10

Post by pmiller2 »

dirtyaura wrote: post #6

Google has an unique software engineering culture that was built and designed by the first engineers. Many of the practices show deep understanding of the challenges that growing an engineering culture faces. A few examples: There are clearly defined initiation rites for new employees that make them familiar with the engineering practices. Focus is on a few key languages (C++, Java, Javascript, Python, Go) and code r…

I'm interested to know more about the "initiation rites."
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