Building a developer-centric company culture (SE Careers London)
18 June 2014
- Not hiring developers but empowered engineers
- High retention rate
- No contracts (wouldn’t be part of culture and long-term plan)
- Intrinsic desire to build: have they built something because they wanted to and are they willing to take ownership?
- Use new technologies in product: ensure people are willng to embrace change and contribute new ideas
- Engineers don’t report to their tech lead but directly to founder
- A lot of task automation
- Keep developers free of generic IT tasks
- Humbleness: Solve important problems immediately
- do IT tasks to let other developers work
- doing cleaning tasks : very visible problem, raises appreciation by staff
- Unique “Secret Sauce” to attract developers:
- Secret Sales: Continuous deployment
Joel Spolsky (Stack Exchange/Fog Creek)
- Started FogCreek to make a company that cares about developers
- development in NY often treated as support function
- Private offices for developers to optimize productivity
- Expensive and inflexible
- Solution: allow remote work
- Needs easy communication to work together
- Skype/Google Hangouts
- overlapping workday
- ensure high-quality audio
- meet in person occasionally (but not as a big design meeting)
- Advantages of online meetings
- access to computer during meeting
- side comments/jokes don’t interrupt
- allows lurking while getting work done
- Avoid conference room meetings with remote participants
- Poor audio
- Conference room people might not have access to their computer/can’t share screen or documents