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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?

#111

Post by thrwwyngnr »

Aeolun wrote: post #87
thrwwyngnr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Why would you fire a product manager for being unable to deliver if the team is not delivering?

Yeah, that's something I also don't understand.

Honestly, I'm a bit inclined to think there is a problem with engineering, since they were able to test lots of different strategies and group dynamics in the last three years, and none of them has worked so far.

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

shanghaiaway wrote: post #95
ohazi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a lot more cases of "disfunctional company struggles to hire/retain good engineers," "non-technical founder seeks engineer to do all the work," etc. than the converse (firms with good engineering talent struggling to find good management). So maybe engineers are special? They can certainly afford be more choosey about who they decide to work for. It probably makes sense for a company to treat engineers as spec…

Sounds like you're in a filter bubble. Can't have good engineering without good management.

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by _ah »

You company has weak management VISION. There is no shared sense of purpose, so you've got infighting. Echoing some others, the steps to fix are:

1. Put in strong very senior leadership. Ultimately a lot of this rolls up to the very top, so your founders / C-level folks may need coaching or replacement (!)

2. Promote a strong vision: This is what our company does, this is where we're going, here's why it matters. We are all ONE TEAM.

3. Integrate engineering with the rest of the org, as suggested by others. This includes physical integration (seating) as well as exposure to work that the rest of the company does. Have some sales folks sit in on Eng meetings too to build cross-departmental understanding. There needs to be strong mutual respect which is really lacking.

4. Declare the One Way that work will be done (Iteration, Waterfall, or whatever you decide). There should be a single methodology for Engineering to execute tasks. Everyone in the org needs to sign on for this work, or leave.

5. Relentlessly recruit and promote leaders who share the vision for the company, and the vision for the work style. No one gets to just throw a fit and do their own thing.

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

#114

Post by ohazi »

shanghaiaway wrote: post #95
ohazi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a lot more cases of "disfunctional company struggles to hire/retain good engineers," "non-technical founder seeks engineer to do all the work," etc. than the converse (firms with good engineering talent struggling to find good management). So maybe engineers are special? They can certainly afford be more choosey about who they decide to work for. It probably makes sense for a company to treat engineers as spec…

Sounds like you're in a filter bubble. Can't have good engineering without good management.

> Can't have good engineering without good management.

This is not even remotely true.

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

#115

Post by ken »

thrwwyngnr wrote: post #78
ken wrote: post #52

How's your hiring process? It sounds like you're trying to be all things to all engineers -- and not being any of them to almost anyone. (We're tight-knit and cultured, but loose and independent! We're moving fast, and slow! We're making something simple, with a million LOC! Our process has "fail-safes", and yet somehow we have a ton of bugs!) The one dichotomy I believe is that you're micro-managing and not managing…

> You need to figure out what kind of company you are, and then hire (and maybe fire) based on that. No engineer is accusing NASA of being too fastidious, or Facebook for moving too fast, because everybody is on the same page from day one. That makes a lot of sense. The multitude of complaints show me that we're not only communicating what we want to, but also we're failing at communicating what kind of engineers we…

Not just hiring, but leadership of existing employees. Be careful not to try to brush it off as "We hired the wrong people (so we just need to fire everybody and start over, and all our problems will be solved)".

Many people are flexible enough that they could work for a range of styles. In the absence of leadership, they have to make up the answer themselves. Everybody makes up their own answer, and then everybody is frustrated that their coworkers aren't behaving correctly for their view of how the company should operate.

At every level, your engineering managers need to know what type of company it is, and provide clarity.

"We've got 'fail-safes' on our SAAS release process, and we're still shipping 100 new bugs a week. Clearly, something is horribly broken here. Based on our company values, we can all see that the solution is ___." Remove the fail-safes? Fix the fail-safes? Ship more often? Ship less often? Kill the product? Cut features? Spend a month just fixing bugs? There's no one correct answer, but you have to decide.

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

#116

Post by fredophile »

thrwwyngnr wrote: post #76
EliRivers wrote: post #22

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…

Actually, most employees have the perception that the company has a strong culture and identity but engineering doesn't really fit in it. It was research made by HR. I could ask employees themselves, or HR.

What is this strong culture? In what ways do other parts of the company feel engineering doesn't reflect this culture? If you asked the engineers, what would they say the company culture is? How do they feel about the rest of the company and the culture outside of engineering? It sounds like you actually have at least two different cultures in the company. That isn't necessarily a bad thing but if it is causing problems then the failure is in leadership.

The first thing I'd recommend is a round table discussion or other feedback mechanism from the engineers themselves. Based on that feedback someone in leadership will need to make some decisions and see that they're enforced. Lots of other people have discussed the type of decisions that may need to be made so I'm not going to repeat it here.

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

#117

Post by AnimalMuppet »

lsc wrote: post #57

>Problem is, we're growing, but can't keep engineers. In the beginning of the year we had half the number of employees we have now, but twice as much engineers as today. An engineer left us three weeks ago and two more gave notice and are leaving in January. Hiring is extremely hard because of economy. So I know nobody want's to say it, but I think that as a non-technical person, you should be focusing on pay here, a…

> So I know nobody want's to say it, but I think that as a non-technical person, you should be focusing on pay here, and that everything else will follow.

Maybe not. Over my career, I've learned that good work conditions (reasonable management, working with people I like, work-life balance) trumps absolute pay as a motive to work (or continue to work) somewhere.

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

#118

Post by lsc »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #117
lsc wrote: post #57

>Problem is, we're growing, but can't keep engineers. In the beginning of the year we had half the number of employees we have now, but twice as much engineers as today. An engineer left us three weeks ago and two more gave notice and are leaving in January. Hiring is extremely hard because of economy. So I know nobody want's to say it, but I think that as a non-technical person, you should be focusing on pay here, a…

> So I know nobody want's to say it, but I think that as a non-technical person, you should be focusing on pay here, and that everything else will follow. Maybe not. Over my career, I've learned that good work conditions (reasonable management, working with people I like, work-life balance) trumps absolute pay as a motive to work (or continue to work) somewhere.

One of the arguments I was advancing was that there is a very strong correlation between pay and how well I am treated once I get there; to the point, I think, where evaluating pay might be the most effective way to evaluate how well I'll be treated in non-monetary ways; the most effective way to make up for the fact that it's really difficult to tell how well a place treats you before you show up for work.

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

#119

Post by AnimalMuppet »

lsc wrote: post #118
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I know nobody want's to say it, but I think that as a non-technical person, you should be focusing on pay here, and that everything else will follow. Maybe not. Over my career, I've learned that good work conditions (reasonable management, working with people I like, work-life balance) trumps absolute pay as a motive to work (or continue to work) somewhere.

One of the arguments I was advancing was that there is a very strong correlation between pay and how well I am treated once I get there; to the point, I think, where evaluating pay might be the most effective way to evaluate how well I'll be treated in non-monetary ways; the most effective way to make up for the fact that it's really difficult to tell how well a place treats you before you show up for work.

That's fair. My comment was more on leaving - if I already know that management is sane where I currently am, and I like my co-workers, I would think very carefully before leaving for more money.

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

#120

Post by thrwwyngnr »

cbanek wrote: post #80
thrwwyngnr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> 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. Engineers can get very touchy about code they write. It's kind of their baby. It sounds like the highest levels of mana…

> It sounds like the highest levels of management have written what is being run, and yet not want to seem to maintain it, or directly lead the engineering org.

Well, in their defense: they have to, you know... run the company.

Engineering was supposed to maintain the current software, but they (engineering) chose to deprecate it and make a new version from scratch. It is just taking way longer than expected, three years and just a fraction of the original functionality.

> If an employee finds a much better way of doing things, the founders should be happy, but they may be sending mixed signals.

Problem is: they're not doing anything better. Customers prefer the old software. Other employees prefer the old software. Even some people on the team prefer the old software.

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