Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

> [...] or leaving while complaining about different things. All but salary. They had two raises in 2018 and pretty much everyone left got a promotion in 2018.

I'll be honest and guess most people said this probably thought about their compensation. It's not about whether you gave them a promotion, or a raise. If they found a job paying better, with better benefits, they're gonna switch. Now humans aren't robots so you can assume some people will stay in the company for various reasons. But if you see that people systematically leave your company, I think this might mean that you're paying less compared to other tech companies down the street. My 2c. Happy new year!

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, but they're super polarized.

Half the team is the MVP-lean-startup-crowd and is constantly complaining that the code is too complex, with too many abstractions and it is and hard to test and debug. They claim they want to push simpler code that works and optimize/refactor as needed, but that never flies on code reviews. They claim that the constant refactoring (I swear I hear that word ten times a day) are causing way too many bugs.

The other half comes from an enterprise background and complains that the code is currently too messy and unsafe, and claim they need to refactor weird parts before doing pretty much any feature. They believe in making bigger deliveries instead of incremental ones, and point to bugs caused by the other team as proof that they need more time to get it right.

For obvious reasons, management has ALWAYS sided with group number one, which caused a lot of problems and accusations of favoritism.

My hot take? Yeah, three years is way too long for a simple web app from a startup to be ready.

I think money is more than that, though? I mean, I... almost agree with what I said when I said "to translate this into manager speak" - Like, the differences between how Engineers were treated in the '90s and early aughts, and now... I think it's mostly that we get paid like two to four times what we did, and because of that[1], the non-technical people we work with now treat us with a whole lot more respect than they used to.

I mean, I personally see the same thing looking at friends who are moving up through the less well-paying portions of the tech sector. Its like it's hard-wired into people that they can treat people they pay poorly worse than they treat people who are paid well.[2]

I think there is also this very strong cultural norm that we shouldn't talk about money or especially we shouldn't complain about money. Like as a technical individual contributor, we need to pretend that we are doing this because we love it rather than because it pays really well. I even feel it in myself, sometimes, (though I think it's fundamentally better for us, as workers, to talk about compensation in an open sort of way) - I mean, don't get me wrong, I love doing what I do, but if someone offers me a bunch more money to do the same thing? Yeah, that's hard to turn down.

But I mean, my point here is that if someone else offers a bunch more money, a lot of people, when asked why they are leaving, are going to talk about non-monetary stuff, even if it really was mostly about the money.

But also, like I was saying above, I think that if you aren't paying as much as the competition, you almost certainly aren't treating your people as well in non-monetary ways. I really do think that if you want a business oriented person to treat someone else better, you pay that someone else more money, because that's what business people are hard-wired to respect. (If you want an Engineer to treat someone well, you point out something technically difficult/that requires a great deal of intelligence that person has done)

I mean, I suppose I'm not being that helpful, just 'cause if you felt like you could pay these people more, you probably would. The FAANG companies are paying a lot to regular individual contributor engineers, and that's just really hard to compete with.

https://www.paysa.com/salaries/google--software-engineer-3 ('3' here means that you went to college and passed the google SWE interview.) - point being that there is a whole lot of money sloshing around. Like, a whole lot more than I used to think there was.

[1]other than temporal correlation, I actually don't have actual evidence for causality here. I do strongly believe that there is causality here, though)

[2]this always seemed super weird to me, just 'cause if you pay me enough more than I can get otherwise, I'm willing to endure a lot... I've spent a lot of effort looking for jobs where they'd pay me extra for enduring bullshit or even actual physical danger.... but none of those jobs I've found pay as well as staying safe and comfortable in silicon valley.