One of my favorite interview questions that I ask engineering candidates is to tell me about one thing they liked and one thing they disliked about the engineering culture at their previous company. I’ve interviewed over 500 people – many of them from top tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Palantir, and Dropbox – and over time, this interview question has given me a sense of what good engineers look for and what they’re trying to avoid. Reflecting back on the interview responses and on my own experiences from the past seven years working across Google, Ooyala, and Quora, I’ve distilled ten things that a team can do to build a good engineering culture. http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-engineering-culture

1. What makes a great engineering culture?
Edmond Lau
@edmondlau
www.theeffectiveengineer.com

2. About me
- Former engineering lead of user growth at Quora
- Led teams at Ooyala and worked on Google search
- Writing a book on how to be an effective software engineer

3. Growing the team at Quora
- Helped grow company from 12 to almost 70
- Started mentoring & onboarding programs for new engineers
- Developed interview guidelines and training sessions

4. Interviewed 500+ people
- Many engineers from strong engineering companies
- Google, Facebook, Palantir, Amazon, Dropbox, Apple, etc.

5. “A good culture attracts and keeps the kind of people
that helps your company become successful.”
-- Andy Parkinson, greatcompanies.io

6. What is one thing you liked and one thing you
disliked about the engineering culture at X?

7. 10 elements of a great engineering culture

8. 01 Optimize for iteration speed

9. Continuous Deployment
Quora released code 40-50 times a day.

10. Developer productivity tools
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous integration testing
- Faster compile and build times
- Incremental reloads for web servers

11. Avoid organizational bottlenecks
- Google's weekly search UI review
- Empower team leads to make decisions
- Define clear channels for quick feedback

12. "Commit, explode, recover. "
-- Bill Walsh, former 49ers coach
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/4439637126/

13. 02 Develop high code quality through code reviews

14. Higher code quality lets you iterate faster
- easier to reason about code
- quicker to modify
- less susceptible to bugs

15. Fix broken windows
Modelling is important
Image Credit: Broken Window, elizjoy

16. 03 Push relentlessly toward automation

17. Automation is extremely high-leverage
- Invest in automated testing.
- Automatically handle failures, restart services.
- Automatically scale up services at peak traffic.

18. "Optimize for minimal
operational burden."
-- Mike Krieger
Instagram co-founder
Grew Instagram to over 40M
users with 13-person team

19. 04 Build the right software abstractions

20. "Pick the right ones, and programming will
flow naturally from design... Pick the wrong
ones, and ... even the simplest of changes will
be hard to make."
-- MIT Professor Daniel Jackson, Software Abstractions

21. Compounding benefits of abstractions
Google - MapReduce, Bigtable, Protocol Buffers
Facebook - Thrift, Hive
Quora - Webnode, Livenode

22. 05 Build an open and respectful work environment

23. “Writing software is
a team sport.”
-- Brian Fitzpatrick and
Ben Collins-Sussman, Team Geek

24. 06 Build shared ownership of code

25. Keep the bus factor > 1
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons ICCE Illinois School Bus

26. 07 Embrace failure and accountability

27. annual award “to the
individual who breaks
flickr.com in the most
spectacular way”
Image Credit: Dylan Couper, dvinfo.net

28. 08 Allot 20% time

29. Promote experimentation
- Google - 20% time
- Ooyala - hackathons
- Quora - offroad weeks
- Facebook, Atlassian, Dropbox
Image Credit: Tempest, http://tempest.deviantart.com/

30. 09 Build a culture of continuous improvement

31. Grow reusable knowledge
- Invest in onboarding and mentoring
- Encourage tech talks and document design discussions
- Write codelabs

32. 10 Make hiring a priority

33. "I figured Google would be better [than
AltaVista] because I knew more of the people
there, and they seemed like they were more
technically savvy."
-- Jeff Dean, Google Fellow, in Steven Levy's In the Plex

34. Build a great engineering culture
1 Iteration speed
2 Code quality
3 Automation
4 Abstraction
5 Respect
6 Shared ownership
7 Accountability
8 20% Time
9 Learning
10 Hiring

35. Q &A
- edmondlau@alum.mit.edu
- @edmondlau
- My upcoming book: www.theeffectiveengineer.com/book