Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

What's being done to infect engineering with the right culture? Culture is automatic. A year or so ago, at my place of employment, software engineering and customer support were newly seated together, almost mixed in together (it's not too noisy, which was my only concern when the idea was suggested - customer support probably fields a half-dozen phone calls a day; they do most of their work through logging in to customer sites and over various text chat formats).

The software engineers see (and sometimes hear) support helping customers and talking about the problems and how best to fix things; they see the results of their good work directly, and they see the results of their bad work directly. They have a cup of coffee with their friends in support who deal directly with the customer's requests and complaints. Now, they're one team; it can be seen in how they interact and how they work together. I get eMails from people in support telling me how helpful various software engineers are and what great work they're doing fixing bugs and adding features, and software engineers take pride in doing a good job to help out the person who sits opposite them. They are SO much more plugged in to the needs of the company. Everything works better. They are steeped in the company culture every day.

It was automatic. We didn't have to tell people to pay attention to the other people. We didn't have to tell software engineers that it was bad when they heard support trying to talk a customer through a UI that they just wrote last week. Writing software that met the needs of the customer was no longer an abstract thing; they could see the effects of good and bad software right there every day, cringing when their good friend was having to apologise repeatedly to a customer for something not working properly and taking pride when a support engineer passed on good words from a happy customer who had received a bugfix. You can't turn culture into process to be followed; so how are you ensuring that your culture is infecting the engineers?

Culture is learned from the people around you. Is your engineering team isolated? Are they simply repeating bad behaviours to each other? Can they see the consequences of doing a bad job? Can they see the consequences of doing a good job? Do your engineers actually have the chance to learn culture, or instead do they just have processes?

Sounds like you're in a filter bubble.

Can't have good engineering without good management.

I’ll second the Joel test. But like a lot of “modernisations”, I think the version you give has lost some of the spirit of the original. Less room for individuality, more tooling, rules, and processes. And losing “quiet working conditions”, in particular, is a big change.

I still find the original holds up pretty well in many environments.

> 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.

What do you mean "doesn't adhere to it"? Culture isn't a policy document that you can shove down people's throats and expect compliance. Culture is much more organic than that.

> Complaints from other workers range from the decision they made to isolate themselves in their own building

And there are good reasons for that. Engineering requires focus and discipline and therefore usually has a very different subculture from the rest of the company.

> how they actively engage in bickering and in-fighting between their own teams, how they have extremely limited communication to the rest of the company (users of their products), and reports of sexual harassment and racism.

And what did management do about these issues? Did management shut down the infighting? Is management accessible and responsive to users? Did management fire people who were found guilty of fireable offenses?

> There's zero consistency between the message they're sending. Some engineers believe the team is moving too fast, while a different group believes they're moving too slow. In the exit interviews we had complaints of micromanaging mixed with complaints of lack of management. The new flagship application we're building is extremely simple, but has way too many lines of code compared to all our other (more complex) applications. The development process is indeed slow and full of fail-safes, but there's still an astounding number of bug reports for a simple app.

Why did management hire every engineer who walked in for an interview?

Go find some competent engineering management.