It’s a good time to be a software engineer. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of computer software engineers is projected to grow 21 percent from 2018 to 2028. Most engineers don’t need to actively job hunt — the offers come to them.
With that in mind, how can companies develop a culture that truly speaks to top talent? According to the following six tech professionals, it comes down to trust and transparency.
Anchor Managing Director of R&D Nir Zicherman said management must trust individual contributors and encourage them to trust one another.
“When this trust manifests itself as tangible user-facing features that solve real problems, it's rewarding for the whole team,” said Zicherman.
At Brex, CTO Cosmin Nicolaescu isn’t picky about where inspiration comes from. He said the engineering team is encouraged to strip new ideas of any assumptions in order to help break traditional financial system molds and ultimately, better serve their customers.
What makes a good engineering culture? What are the most impactful actions you’ve taken to improve your engineering culture?
We believe that every engineer should be making decisions about the most important thing they could build to grow our business. Engineers are empowered to use first principles as they rebuild financial systems that have existed for decades. We’ve built a strong culture of feedback across the company, which has helped not just with personal development, but has also improved tools, processes and culture. Anyone can come up with an idea that changes the company’s trajectory. As a leader at Brex, my job is to create the right forums for people to take these initiatives and support them throughout.
Anyone can come up with an idea that changes the company’s trajectory.’’
How do you ensure engineers continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
Our business growth creates new opportunities every few months. Because we’ve invested in building a collaborative team with supportive managers, each person has a clear path toward discussing both short-term interests as well as longer-term career ambitions.
We consistently encourage people to challenge themselves and try out new things, either temporarily (rotations) or by switching teams (a common example is people rotating between infrastructure and product teams). We’ve also started organizing hackathons a few times per year, which helps bring employees together.
At Orchard, Head of Engineering Dennis Lipovsky is always looking to make processes more seamless, automated and scalable. And collaboration is a big part of that. His team uses the tools at their disposal to keep up with their deployment timeline and value proposition. The company offers users functionality that allows them to, for example, search for available real estate properties by prioritizing photos of rooms they care about most.
What makes a good engineering culture?
Solving interesting problems is a cornerstone of our culture. One big part of that is making sure that engineers can collaborate and focus on solutions that matter most. We invested early on in the tools that support fast and reliable releases and consistently update as the team grows and new challenges arise with our continuous integration and delivery infrastructure.
We deploy several times a day and expect that number to increase as our teams continue to grow. We have a revamped onboarding process, which helps give new engineers business context in their first week. Our technology onboarding process guides them through setup and delivery of their first feature.
Teams work together to figure out the best use of technology depending on the challenge.’’
How do you ensure engineers continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
Orchard is transparent about company goals, the major initiatives that will help best meet those goals and how we are tracking against those goals. Teams work together to figure out the best use of technology depending on the challenge. One additional aspect of building software in the real estate industry is actual exposure to the markets. It is a challenge to build software with a largely New York-based team when the homes are in Texas, Colorado and Georgia. So engineers are encouraged to visit the markets to meet the teams, customers and homes we work with on a daily basis.
At Anchor, Managing Director of R&D Nir Zicherman encourages his team to bring a range of perspectives to any given problem. While this mindset allows engineers to close tickets quickly, it also empowers them to uncover professional areas of interest they might want to pursue further down the line.
What makes a good engineering culture?
At its core, engineering is problem solving. Giving your engineers the tools to solve problems together promotes a positive culture and makes the work more fun and productive. This means management must trust individual contributors and encourage them to trust each other. When this trust manifests itself as tangible user-facing features that solve real problems, it’s rewarding for the whole team.
At its core, engineering is problem solving.’’
How do you ensure engineers continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
We are big believers in exposing engineers to many different challenges, be it different parts of our stack or types of features. In addition to making sure engineers are excited and constantly learning, doing so also strengthens the team by diversifying perspectives on problems. Long-term, we want to offer our engineers the opportunity to grow in areas they find interesting. Exposure to those areas is the best way to help them make informed decisions about how to chart their career paths.
Head of Engineering Stefan Thorpe describes Cherre post-mortems as “blameless.” Thorpe hopes to develop trust and encourage motivation both in and out of meetings, creating space for employees to grow.
What makes a good engineering culture?
Trust is the most fundamental element of a good engineering culture. In fact, it’s omnidirectional across the entire business. I believe the system should always promote trust. Our blameless, project post-mortems are one of my personal favorite implementations in supporting our engineering culture.
Trust is the most fundamental element of a good engineering culture.’’
How do you ensure engineers continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
Challenges always come with building new products and growing. Having an underlying system that provides for standardization as well as flexibility and change allows engineers to spread their wings. For many, simply allowing enough space and opportunity for personal growth and learning is more than enough to maintain high levels of motivation. At Cherre, our fully cross-functional teams enable this naturally.
When business priorities shift at OnSiteIQ, as they do in any growing organization, the engineering team is kept in the loop. This transparency allows developers to better do their job, according to Head of Engineering Kishan Sudusinghe. Leadership prioritizes engineering autonomy and encourages side-project development.
What makes a good engineering culture?
Engineering culture at OnSiteIQ begins with radical transparency and a builder’s mindset. Every engineer is fully aware of the business goals and constant changes to company priorities. This enables them to make process adjustments with a full view of what lies ahead instead of blindly following orders. By providing transparency across the team, each individual engineer is empowered to not only build great products, but also constantly iterate to adjusting priorities and take ownership of certain products. This completes the full cycle and keeps the engines in OnSiteIQ running without any humps.
Engineering culture at OnSiteIQ begins with radical transparency and a builder’s mindset.’’
How do you ensure engineers continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
Innovation is at the core of our engineering culture. Whether it is by finding time to create a custom 360-degree camera rig or building an indie game system using Raspberry Pi, we empower our engineers to continuously innovate and think outside the box to add value to our products and culture. We encourage them to continuously improve on everything they do here.
At Reonomy, engineers are encouraged to share ideas for product and user function improvement at bi-weekly company huddles. Engineering Manager Neil Newman said that seeing such pitches come to life and subsequently make a tangible impact motivates employees.
What makes a good engineering culture?
There’s a lot of personality to the engineering team. We spend most of our day problem-solving, but we also take time to get to know one another either at lunch, playing video games or chess or at one of our team outings. Collaboration can take the form of solving a weird bug or working side by side at a company-wide hackathon.
Ownership is a big part of the success at Reonomy.’’
How do you ensure engineers continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
Ownership is a big part of the success at Reonomy. In the engineering department, we use an Agile process. Everyone is involved from the ideation and planning stage through solutions and delivery. You’ll regularly find a couple of engineers giving in-depth code reviews or devising a plan to incorporate the latest technology into our system. We also encourage engineers to come up with ideas to improve the product and customer experience, which we show off at our bi-weekly company product huddles.
Affirm’s engineering team operates based on open, continuous feedback loops throughout the software development process. But Engineering Manager Mari Puncel understands that a culture of transparency isn’t a sole motivator. She said that her team relies heavily on internal mobility to keep developers engaged and the company current.
What makes a good engineering culture?
I particularly value and emphasize the importance of feedback. Creating open channels for feedback helps individuals learn and teams reflect and improve. I’ve found that providing structure for delivering feedback in the form of retrospectives and one-on-ones and consistently soliciting and appreciating feedback can be impactful.
I particularly value and emphasize the importance of feedback.’’
How do you ensure engineers continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
Internal mobility is important in continuing to engage engineers. Most people are challenged by new experiences, so having the ability to move to a new business domain or tech stack can be very motivating.
