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Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#21

Post by will4274 »

thrwwyngnr wrote: post #20
will4274 wrote: post #16

I'm struck by the way you threw out two totally different types of complaints. Some people will always complain about too much micro-management and macro-management - that's fairly normal. Some people will always not like the guys on the other team, etc. Bugs will happen. Good managers can alleviate these problems and hiring experienced professionals (with the associated price tag) and making a concentrated effort wi…

> Employees will deal with not liking everybody. Money and calm managers will do the trick. Woah. That's the money quote for me. Now that you mention it, we haven't had calm managers in engineering in a while. The recent managers were always extremely angry or anxious, and always afraid not to make progress or making mistakes. I believe those fears trickled-down to the rest of the team, changing the whole group perso…

> rage outbursts, screaming during work hours

I've been working as a software engineer at a big corp for four years, I've never even heard anybody shout, or anything that could be considered a rage outburst. Sometimes the volume goes up a little in meetings. I've heard of one or two people yelling through the grapevine, but I didn't personally observe it. In general, I don't think shouting has any place in a workplace. However, I also wouldn't fire somebody immediately for shouting once - a conversation with their manager and recommendation to take a few days off to unwind is a reasonable reaction to a single incident.

> Inappropriate emails

Can you be a bit more specific? My workplace sees a fair number of testy emails "X is totally fucking wrong" / "X totally shouldn't have been done without consulting me" but from experience, peoples perception of what an inappropriate email is varies widely.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#22

Post by EliRivers »

We have a strong culture, but it is widely felt by the rest of the company that the engineering team doesn't adhere to it.

This evidence indicates that you don't have a strong culture.

Also, there's something not right in the way you say "adhere", but I can't quite put my finger on it. People don't "adhere" to culture; well, they do, but the word "adhere" is simultaneously too strong and too weak for a culture. It's like saying that fish adhere to swimming.

Tell me again that you have a strong culture, but this time don't use the word "culture". Tell me what these behaviours are that everyone does, except engineering. Then pick one and tell me why engineering doesn't do that (and assure me that everyone else does). Do they know about it? Do they think it's a bad idea? Does it not apply to them? Is it too expensive?

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#23

Post by thrwwyngnr »

AlexanderNull wrote: post #18

While not as applicable in situations where the engineering team isn't under much pressure to deliver, there's a pretty common negative feedback loop that can occur with engineer staffing. While under pressure, teams with an adequate or bountiful number of skilled members will generally perform pretty darned well and not have a problem. If anything causes the balance to start tipping too much in the ratio with unskil…

> What management should have done (or needs to do ASAP) was to start trimming poor performing engineers.

Oh, we did that in 2017. The engineers are hard workers and good coders.

Thing is, there aren't really individual performance problems. The problems are mostly cultural: Isolation from the rest of the company, in-fighting, competition, lack of camaraderie between teams and between engineering and the rest of the organization.

When it comes to team performance, half the team believes we're too slow, while the other half thinks we're moving too fast. Even that is a point of disagreement.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#24

Post by EliRivers »

insiderknowled wrote: post #13
thrwwyngnr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take one of the offenders and publicly shit can him. I don't think this will happen because engineers are scarce, and everyone is to blame, kind of. One of the worst offenders (who sent extremely aggressive e-mails to another team member, all trough personal accounts) left a few weeks ago of his own accord, so HR decided not to pursue him. Now that you mention it, that might have sent the wrong message.

It doesn't really matter that it's everyone's to blame. Just find the biggest offender who has pissed off everyone. Make an example out of him. Completely redicule him in front of others and even throw their belongings on the floor. Use most profane language, Steve Jobs style. Make sure you explain loudly why he is being treated like this and leaving the company. To make it clear, yell at him, "so you want to be a re…

This advice is so shockingly bad that I'm wondering if this is a deliberate spoof.

This is the kind of management behaviour that erodes trust. Destroys teams. Stops people thinking about what's best for the company and has them thinking only about how to protect themselves. Team members turn on each other. Every bug becomes a blame game. The good people look for new jobs to move on to. People write anonymous blog posts about the company and how this manager had a screaming fit and trashed some guys desk while firing him; every potential customer googling the company reads it and watches the footage on youtube if someone was fast with their phone.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#25

Post by jdlshore »

insiderknowled wrote: post #13
thrwwyngnr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take one of the offenders and publicly shit can him. I don't think this will happen because engineers are scarce, and everyone is to blame, kind of. One of the worst offenders (who sent extremely aggressive e-mails to another team member, all trough personal accounts) left a few weeks ago of his own accord, so HR decided not to pursue him. Now that you mention it, that might have sent the wrong message.

It doesn't really matter that it's everyone's to blame. Just find the biggest offender who has pissed off everyone. Make an example out of him. Completely redicule him in front of others and even throw their belongings on the floor. Use most profane language, Steve Jobs style. Make sure you explain loudly why he is being treated like this and leaving the company. To make it clear, yell at him, "so you want to be a re…

This is terrible advice, and abusive. It will bend your culture towards one of fear, blame, and finger-pointing. Presumably not what you want.

If someone did this in front of me, I would immediately start privately advocating for their removal from the company.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#26

Post by jpfr »

thrwwyngnr wrote: post #8
evadne wrote: post #7

One way to make it work is to fire everyone and start from scratch. If the application is extremely simple then I trust it could be built by an external team (i.e. outsourced), while you rebuild the team by hiring/vetting one engineer at a time? On one hand you can not try to fix people. On the other hand, this applies to managers too.

> One way to make it work is to fire everyone and start from scratch. OP here. Now that you mention it, one of the engineers said to me a while ago that the whole team was afraid of that happening during the whole year. In fact, that might have a lot to do with the lack of morale (despite that never being in the plans of upper-management - quite the opposite, there were a load of promotions). But it is a solution, in…

What management thinks is irrelevant to morale.

What the engineers believe management thinks is relevant. Your last sentence seems to prove a point here.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#27

Post by jpfr »

thrwwyngnr wrote: post #15
dogweather wrote: post #10

Do you ever fire engineers for being bad at their job? Or for being divisive and spreading a bad attitude? I'm wondering if that doesn't happen at your org. And if not, that'd be a big negative impact on morale.

We do. We promote and fire based on both performance and cultural evaluations. Engineering had some firings in 2017, and we were supposedly left with the best ones. Problem is, things took a 180 curve somewhere, and it became rough in 2018. Maybe management is to blame, but we changed that too and it kept getting worse.

Consulting and “product engineering” are very different in the culture they require to be successful. From your description it sounds your culture is consulting heavy.

Read the books by Rands to understand the difference. And his blog posts about engineer personalities and group dynamics.

http://randsinrepose.com

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#28

Post by thrwwyngnr »

will4274 wrote: post #21
thrwwyngnr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employees will deal with not liking everybody. Money and calm managers will do the trick. Woah. That's the money quote for me. Now that you mention it, we haven't had calm managers in engineering in a while. The recent managers were always extremely angry or anxious, and always afraid not to make progress or making mistakes. I believe those fears trickled-down to the rest of the team, changing the whole group perso…

> rage outbursts, screaming during work hours I've been working as a software engineer at a big corp for four years, I've never even heard anybody shout, or anything that could be considered a rage outburst. Sometimes the volume goes up a little in meetings. I've heard of one or two people yelling through the grapevine, but I didn't personally observe it. In general, I don't think shouting has any place in a workplac…

I completely agree with your first point. We don't really have reports of people shouting with each other outside of engineering, and that's why people don't really know what to about that.

> Can you be a bit more specific?

Testy is a good adjective for them. One of the worst contained profanities, but was sent using personal e-mail accounts (but it was sent from work and was about work).

There were some company-wide e-mails with thinly veiled criticism and passive-aggressive remarks regarding the (bad) work of other engineerings teams. People pointing fingers and trying to assign blame.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

#30

Post by thrwwyngnr »

jpfr wrote: post #26
thrwwyngnr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One way to make it work is to fire everyone and start from scratch. OP here. Now that you mention it, one of the engineers said to me a while ago that the whole team was afraid of that happening during the whole year. In fact, that might have a lot to do with the lack of morale (despite that never being in the plans of upper-management - quite the opposite, there were a load of promotions). But it is a solution, in…

What management thinks is irrelevant to morale. What the engineers believe management thinks is relevant. Your last sentence seems to prove a point here.

> What the engineers believe management thinks is relevant. Your last sentence seems to prove a point here.

Yep, you have a point.

And you're absolutely right: I shouldn't have even considered that suggestion, even though I'm not their manager, or even though I'm anonymous.

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