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Ask HN: Software Craft in Your Company

I'm Tech Lead in a relatively sized Corp (3k employees, 200 developers) and I'm doing full stack from mobile to Backend and APIs, and I was wondering what is the state of Software Craft in your company. More specifically how did you create a culture of development quality (well-crafted software) ? What are successful insights to install a culture of learning and make other developers unite and want to improve (create a community of professionals)? I've been trying for a year (events, katas, coding games, tech watch, ...) and definitely had some results with some of our passionate developers (approx. 20 to 30) but having a hard time to gather more developers, either they don't have a time or they don't want to take it (probably they see no value?). OTOH we have recurrent defects and code smell, code review is not always enforced properly, unit tests not optimal (or not properly understood). Do you do weekly katas? Weekly events? Some kind of university inside the Corp? Mob programming? Did you reach to your management to have developers having actually time to devote to improvement? Deliver somewhat less but with more confidence, better quality meaning less people woke up at night. I know I won't be able to have everyone interested, but I'd be delighted to see what the HN crowd is doing regarding this subject, so that I can also improve :)

president 7y ago
What is your goal with the coding events? These things have more to do with motivation, innovation, and team-bonding but very little bearing on quality of employee code culture. Also, the most productive engineers will not want to waste valuable time on these types of events. The only genuine way to foster a software engineering culture is to hire proven and experienced software veterans as leaders in your engineering organization. And when I say proven and experienced, I don't mean people that are just good at LeetCode. Remember, culture always comes top-down and the best coding culture is a result of good mentoring and calling out bad coding practices before it spreads like a virus.
- incognitotech 7y ago
  My goal was to start something and make people know each other around drinks and some interesting stuff like conference videos, latest news (react hooks / suspense at the time, Spring related, Functional Programming, ...). Really just to start something because teams are isolated and don't speak that much to each others. When something is not working it's always another team fault for example. I think you're right regarding the hiring process, ours is just "soso", we would definitely need more software veterans. We have some but not so many and even with events/meetings/chapters where we make decisions about code review/best practices and so on, but not enough seniors to actually enforce this in each team and keep an eye on it.

president 7y ago

What is your goal with the coding events? These things have more to do with motivation, innovation, and team-bonding but very little bearing on quality of employee code culture. Also, the most productive engineers will not want to waste valuable time on these types of events. The only genuine way to foster a software engineering culture is to hire proven and experienced software veterans as leaders in your engineering organization. And when I say proven and experienced, I don't mean people that are just good at LeetCode. Remember, culture always comes top-down and the best coding culture is a result of good mentoring and calling out bad coding practices before it spreads like a virus.

incognitotech 7y ago
My goal was to start something and make people know each other around drinks and some interesting stuff like conference videos, latest news (react hooks / suspense at the time, Spring related, Functional Programming, ...). Really just to start something because teams are isolated and don't speak that much to each others. When something is not working it's always another team fault for example. I think you're right regarding the hiring process, ours is just "soso", we would definitely need more software veterans. We have some but not so many and even with events/meetings/chapters where we make decisions about code review/best practices and so on, but not enough seniors to actually enforce this in each team and keep an eye on it.