Make them owners / stakeholders in your business.
Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
81–90 of 143 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#82To me, what your describing is a management deficiency. My first guess would be you lack highly skilled engineers at all levels of management in your company. This is a common oversight in tech companies to not consider that people at all levels of the company should be skilled in engineering. If this guess is wrong then the rest of the post doesn't apply. If you were starting a chain of restaurants you wouldn't hire…
Every employee is expected "to be able to fill out reports, spreadsheets, provide data metrics, understand the work place harassment polices, health care benefits, present in team meetings, etc.." Engineers are not special.
I know over three engineers who left their companies because of the stringent bureaucracy expectations, filling out reports and the like. It was boring to them.
They all got new jobs within a week.
Unlike other positions, for engineers, it's the companies that are replaceable, not the employees.
Engineers are special whether we like it or not.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#83To me, what your describing is a management deficiency. My first guess would be you lack highly skilled engineers at all levels of management in your company. This is a common oversight in tech companies to not consider that people at all levels of the company should be skilled in engineering. If this guess is wrong then the rest of the post doesn't apply. If you were starting a chain of restaurants you wouldn't hire…
Every employee is expected "to be able to fill out reports, spreadsheets, provide data metrics, understand the work place harassment polices, health care benefits, present in team meetings, etc.." Engineers are not special.
Engineers are special in that they ideally understand every aspect of your business if you want them to be most effective.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your company has a LEADERSHIP Problem! And the 'cultural' problems: isolation, in-fighting, counter-productive competition, are symptoms. Your 'leaders' have hired misguided Engineering Managers who created an environment that made this behavior possible, and your leadership is allowing it to continue. > First Question: Are your founders / leaders Engineers? > Second Question: Why do team members think that you're mo…
> Are your founders / leaders Engineers? Actually, yes. They wrote the software that is currently used in production. But they don't want to touch engineering with a ten-feet pole. One time they complained that engineering was taking too long to finish stuff and engineering demanded an apology. > Why do team members think that you're moving too-slow / too-fast? Good question. Both sides provide very good arguments, b…
Whoever is in control of this team, needs to pick one, and stick with it. Hiring enterprise developers if you really want your MVP out the door yesterday is asking for trouble.
It also leads me to believe your product currently has a dearth of tests. Most of the bugs that are generated from refactoring should be caught by automated tests. Until you have tests, you shouldn’t refactor (always write a test first).
If your product is too difficult to test, the enterprise crowd may have a point and the initial (and further) architectural decisions have been wrong, and this suggests a lack of senior engineers.
Last point, if your abstractions are making it more difficult to test, then the abstractions are almost certainly wrong.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#85One approach to try is to physically integrate engineering with the rest of the company. If there's engineers that work on sales tools, have them work next to the sales group. Secondly get engineers more involved in other parts of the company. If marketing is having a team offsite, send an engineer that works on that tech with the team. Get engineers involved in business-related meetings where they can learn both the…
> If engineering is acting like a disorganized, isolated group in the company, it's often (in my experience) because management has created structures that keep them feeling isolated and without a sense of ownership/belonging. OP here. This is an extremely interesting insight. Now that I think about it, engineers were indeed isolated for a long time, because PO and UX people were the ones doing all the talking with s…
This sounds like people coming from an enterprise instead of startup background to me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#86Well, I’d say the first thing to fix is to talk to them and ask them why they find value in being in a separate building and why they don’t want to talk to their customers. Without strong management, it’s possible it’s because their customers aren’t correctly handled. As for the application, it’s the same thing.
Your engineering team has poor management (though I’d be surprised if it were just them). If you have a Product team, they need to all go.
Assuming that the problem is as stated and I can’t talk to anyone to get a gauge of the situation, here’s what I’d do:
* get rid of Product
* optionally reorganize around conceptual product lines, optionally with separate core services teams if required whose customers are the product developers
* ask engineering to move to some rapid iteration cycle process with demos at every sprint or unit of development cycle
* ask customer teams to send representatives to review demos
* hire the minimal number of PMs to mediate those interactions and to sell engineers on the problems the customers have, providing insight into what their ‘market’ wants, and show how well they’re doing it. They have to believe in the fact that the product is providing someone somewhere value
* make an engineer the ruler of every engineering team’s backlog. prioritization is done with the assistance of the PM’s expertise.
* only production showstoppers go to the OC queue for hotfix, the rest go into the backlog and are prioritized or left to remain in the software
* hire engineers with experience at high salaries and use them as role models
* if you can collocate engineers with non-engineers that would be great. Everyone has to be respectful of each other’s environment, though, so if you have a problem with self-awareness this is not great. (E.g. chatty teams aren’t good next to quiet teams, phone calls are not great near engineers, etc.)
You have a product ownership problem and an interaction problem. Your management is likely crap.
Weak diagnosis but imperfect information so just consider that a low probability Bayesian estimate.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did some major management change happen in your company, recently? I've seen this happen, and many people just didn't like where things were going, and how (the "how" was particularly influential, needless to say).
We had two changes recently. Managers were fired because the team wasn't performing well at all and failed key deliveries. Oh, we're also in our fourth product manager in three years. The previous three left because they were (of course) unable to deliver.
Why would you fire a product manager for being unable to deliver if the team is not delivering?
I’d probably only be concerned if they were delivering the wrong things (e.g. if business requirement feature translation goes wrong).
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pos…
I think you have a slightly distorted view of how firing works in a well-adjusted company.
If someone is slowly eroding the motivation of your other engineers, then you should get rid of them for both your sakes (they probably hate working there anyway).
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
OP here. Yeah, that's not gonna fly here at all.
Firing people? Or public shitcanning?
Because I think the person above you is just talking about letting people go.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pos…
I think you have a slightly distorted view of how firing works in a well-adjusted company. If someone is slowly eroding the motivation of your other engineers, then you should get rid of them for both your sakes (they probably hate working there anyway).
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