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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 b

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.

EliRivers 8y ago
What's being done to infect engineering with the right culture? Culture is automatic. A year or so ago, at my place of employment, software engineering and customer support were newly seated together, almost mixed in together (it's not too noisy, which was my only concern when the idea was suggested - customer support probably fields a half-dozen phone calls a day; they do most of their work through logging in to customer sites and over various text chat formats). The software engineers see (and sometimes hear) support helping customers and talking about the problems and how best to fix things; they see the results of their good work directly, and they see the results of their bad work directly. They have a cup of coffee with their friends in support who deal directly with the customer's requests and complaints. Now, they're one team; it can be seen in how they interact and how they work together. I get eMails from people in support telling me how helpful various software engineers are and what great work they're doing fixing bugs and adding features, and software engineers take pride in doing a good job to help out the person who sits opposite them. They are SO much more plugged in to the needs of the company. Everything works better. They are steeped in the company culture every day. It was automatic. We didn't have to tell people to pay attention to the other people. We didn't have to tell software engineers that it was bad when they heard support trying to talk a customer through a UI that they just wrote last week. Writing software that met the needs of the customer was no longer an abstract thing; they could see the effects of good and bad software right there every day, cringing when their good friend was having to apologise repeatedly to a customer for something not working properly and taking pride when a support engineer passed on good words from a happy customer who had received a bugfix. You can't turn culture into process to be followed; so how are you ensuring that your culture is infecting the engineers? Culture is learned from the people around you. Is your engineering team isolated? Are they simply repeating bad behaviours to each other? Can they see the consequences of doing a bad job? Can they see the consequences of doing a good job? Do your engineers actually have the chance to learn culture, or instead do they just have processes?
fredophile 8y ago
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.

EliRivers 8y ago

What's being done to infect engineering with the right culture? Culture is automatic. A year or so ago, at my place of employment, software engineering and customer support were newly seated together, almost mixed in together (it's not too noisy, which was my only concern when the idea was suggested - customer support probably fields a half-dozen phone calls a day; they do most of their work through logging in to customer sites and over various text chat formats). The software engineers see (and sometimes hear) support helping customers and talking about the problems and how best to fix things; they see the results of their good work directly, and they see the results of their bad work directly. They have a cup of coffee with their friends in support who deal directly with the customer's requests and complaints. Now, they're one team; it can be seen in how they interact and how they work together. I get eMails from people in support telling me how helpful various software engineers are and what great work they're doing fixing bugs and adding features, and software engineers take pride in doing a good job to help out the person who sits opposite them. They are SO much more plugged in to the needs of the company. Everything works better. They are steeped in the company culture every day. It was automatic. We didn't have to tell people to pay attention to the other people. We didn't have to tell software engineers that it was bad when they heard support trying to talk a customer through a UI that they just wrote last week. Writing software that met the needs of the customer was no longer an abstract thing; they could see the effects of good and bad software right there every day, cringing when their good friend was having to apologise repeatedly to a customer for something not working properly and taking pride when a support engineer passed on good words from a happy customer who had received a bugfix. You can't turn culture into process to be followed; so how are you ensuring that your culture is infecting the engineers? Culture is learned from the people around you. Is your engineering team isolated? Are they simply repeating bad behaviours to each other? Can they see the consequences of doing a bad job? Can they see the consequences of doing a good job? Do your engineers actually have the chance to learn culture, or instead do they just have processes?

fredophile 8y ago

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.