
Building an Engineering Culture from scratch? - Nilef
I work for a BigCo (close to 100K employees) who recently decided to stop outsourcing all of their development efforts to India and to start building teams of engineers, moving towards Cloud, api-first thinking and other modcons.<p>As part of my new role in this structure, I&#x27;m tasked with helping build out an engineering team. From spending a lot of time on HN, my biggest concern is making sure a culture that prioritises customers outcomes, developer experience and fast delivery takes hold amongst both new employees and existing employees.<p>So my question is - Does anyone have tips&#x2F;experience&#x2F;articles&#x2F;books to share which might give me a head-start on building a sustainable and desirable engineering culture?
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AnimalMuppet
Some tips, based somewhat on experience:

Hire grownups. Hire people who won't do politics, who won't harass people, who
will get their work done instead of slacking, and who know (or can learn) to
use the tools, languages, and techniques you think should be used.

Somebody's got to keep the BigCo bureaucracy from strangling the team's
ability to get things done. If that's you, I pity you, but _somebody 's_ got
to do it.

Your job includes managing both the procedures and the culture. Remember that
both of these are things that you can change. "This is the way the BigCo CTO
thinks the procedure should be" is not a good argument unless you've tried
_very_ hard to push back against it. (Even then, it may only be an argument
that you can't do what you're trying to do in BigCo in any reasonable way, and
that it's time to move on.)

If your team can in fact do fast delivery, somewhere up the reporting chain
you're going to have an impedance mismatch with somebody who expects
waterfall-style pacing and reporting. You're either going to have to persuade
that person to let you run leaner and move faster, or else you're going to
need political cover from even higher up to use against that person.

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matt_the_bass
Great comment. I have $0.02 to add:

You may wish to consider writing down a mission statement / manifesto / spec
on what you want for the culture. Then get some buy in from above.

Also, have you been happy at this company so far? If so, I’m hopeful you can
keep it a place you’ll be happy (I.e keep it on track) If not, you probably
still won’t be after this.

Good luck. I look forward to other people’s comments here too.

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cimmanom
Be the culture you want to encourage.

People entering a new community (that's what your team is) typically take a
couple days to feel out what the existing norms are, and will adopt those
norms -- go along to get along -- as long as the norms are reasonably in line
with their values.

That is, you might not get someone who wears a burqa to switch to hotpants,
but you might convince her to wear a green one instead of a blue one, or to
wear a baseball cap on top.

A developer who's passionate about writing provably mathematically correct
software for space shuttles might have difficulty adapting to a "move fast and
break things" mindset, but s/he might be willing to adjust from a waterfall
process to one that involves more frequent customer feedback. Determining what
sort of adjustments people are willing to make is an important part of the
hiring process.

The exceptions to the "adopt existing norms" rule are people who are immature
or assholes. See also AnimalMuppet's comment about hiring grownups.

Culture is least sticky at the earliest stages when there are only a few
people in the existing community, and it hasn't been established for long. The
more people you have in the community and the longer it's been established,
the more inertia the culture has, so the personality differences of a single
addition are less likely to change it significantly unless they're a truly
raging asshole and you let them stomp all over people for too long.

At the beginning, be VERY careful about those first few hires. The culture
they adopt will basically be the culture of your team for a very long time.
You're more likely to have to spend a lot of time setting an example, speaking
explicitly about the norms you want to enforce, and quietly taking people
aside to correct them when they violate those norms.

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cottonseed
Chapter 9: Boostrapping Culture of The Manager's Path [0] discusses this
directly. You might also be interested in the earlier chapters on building and
leading teams.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-
Grow...](https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-
Growth/dp/1491973897)

