The Live Series Podcast

How to Build a Good Engineering Culture in the Hiring Process | Roundtable

Jake is joined by three engineering experts to discuss what makes a good or a bad engineering culture, how culture can affect the hiring process and managing culture in a remote team.

Our guests are:

Aaron Eisenberger, Director of Engineering at Prizepicks
Matt Ellis, VP Engineering at Cathmere
Vikas Verma, Senior Engineering Manager at GoGuardian
Andy Lu, Engineering Manager, formerly Vroom

Visit our website | https://www.amicusjobs.com/

Join our Slack channel | amicusjobs.com/leadersgroup

Broadcast on:: 13 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) So, first of all, thanks guys for joining. I know, as I've mentioned to a couple of you already, it's been difficult trying to get availabilities over the different time zones and appreciate seniority of you guys. It's difficult to get availabilities. So, thank you very much, first of all. I was just saying before I came on, I am by no means an expert, like a podcast expert or anything like that. So, please bear with me. I'm still learning and trying to get better at these things. But ultimately, what I wanted to do this, because, you know, I've been doing technical recruitment a long time, but I want to do something different. I want to stand out, but I also want to give back to the engineering community. And I think it's great for engineers, up and coming engineering leaders to hear from experienced people as well. So, that's the whole point of this. So, the topic that we kind of discussed previously, and I've picked first for today, was how to build a good engineering culture throughout the hiring process. I do really want this to flow naturally. I don't want to kind of just be questions and answers throughout. So, please people just jump in for our, ask each other questions. Please give personal experience examples. Anything kind of related to what we mentioned. I won't keep you longer than 30 minutes either. I appreciate everyone's busy and got stuff to do. So, just kind of introducing myself to start things off. And then I'll kind of go around the room with a quick introduction. But I'm Jacob Regan. I spoke to all of you individually. I've principled technology recruiter for over eight years. Mainly, the first five years of my career was across Europe and the last three across the US. Were to major brands and helped grow some fantastic startups in the Goang space in particular, and more recently sort of Goang and engineering leadership type positions. So, that's me. Anyone want to go first with a quick intro and then we'll get going? - Hello, champion. - Oh, nice, go ahead. (laughing) - Oh, I'm sorry, did I say over? - No, you're good, please go ahead. - Oh, yeah. Sorry, Vikas. Yeah, hey, my name's Matt Ellis. I'm the VP of Engineering, Cathmere. We're a FinTech startup building a new blockchain finance product. - Awesome. - All right, my jump in next. Vikas, and I'm surprised you call my name absolutely perfectly. I've seen some time people call it Vikas, but yeah, it's Vikas. Thanks for that. - No, it's awesome. - Yeah. (laughing) Yeah, I've been a senior inch manager and I've been handling various leadership positions in the past for over 12 years now in different startups. So, currently leading EdTech space, we are in K to 12 and higher education space. No surprise, everybody jumped in that space during COVID. But yeah, I'm sticking around still there. Yeah, happy to connect. - Really, thank you very much, Vikas. - My name's Aaron, currently Director of Engineering at PrizePix for a daily sports fantasy company. In particular at PrizePix, we've seen a lot of growth over the past year since I've been there, so, you know, cultures come up in conversation a number of times and how we reserve that as we grow quickly. So, awesome. - Thanks very much, Aaron. Andy. - Last time I was in the name of (indistinct) I mean, in sophomore engineering domain for about 19 years now, pre-traditional career path developer, senior and into management. I've been in management roles for about nine years as well. So, I've been doing this for a while, work with big company as well as the startups and yeah, happy to be here, nice to meet everyone. - Brilliant, so guys, thank you very much. Basically, like I said, I'll be here. No one wants to hear from me. No one wants to hear my opinions on things because ultimately they want to hear from you guys as the experts. So, I kind of sent out originally a few sub-questions, which is stuff that I thought was important and to kind of kick us off. But, you know, if anyone wants to kind of go first, I'd love to hear everyone's kind of individual opinions on a few things and then kind of get a group discussion going, I suppose, but anyone want to kick us off with what, in their opinion, is a good engineering culture or what makes a good engineering culture. - Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this a bit before the call and we talking about a lot about culture, you know, in terms of the bells and whistles and the benefits that we get, but really when I think of culture, it's kind of the work environment that you want to have for your employees in general. So, I think about that in terms of creating an environment of psychological safety, where developers are encouraged and feel comfortable, being able to communicate and collaborate, and then also implies having managers in leadership who really care about employees and can be empathic and just want to start a conversation around that because it's one of the things that drives our culture at RISEPix. - Mm-hmm. Anyone got a thing to... - Yeah, I'll echo most of it and I do have experience with working with startups as well as with Microsoft. So that's, there's such a huge difference between the culture of a startup space and a big company. - Largely, it's the same around, you know, you have to have ownership and good code and all those kind of things. But the one thing that I've seen very different between the two industries or two sides of industries is a fast pace in the startup. Like you do not, your shelf life of a software is probably not as long as in a bigger company. So you're not thinking, writing a code which can be maintained and can live for next five years in our startups. You're looking for more agile, like, okay, can this get us from point A to point B? And sometimes you do cut shortcuts. You do have a smaller budget. You do have a smaller team. So the code is not probably as maintainable. Oftentimes be adding more to the technical debt just to get ahead with the competition, get to the next big sale, get to the next, you know, next big funding round. But we try to still maintain a fine balance. And that's really critical to maintain that kind of fine balance. You know, just copy pasting everything and you every different kind of language. Some would argue, you know, having 10 different programming languages across the same code base is okay. But with a smaller team size, you kind of want to have more of a harmony of what you want to do. And yeah, but once you go through the stages, oftentimes after C, C or D, you try to bring the more mature processes around, you know, your code reviews get more stringent than you don't allow anything to just go into your code base and those kind of things. So yeah, that's, I think the biggest difference I've seen between the two culture. Otherwise, largely the ownership and the transparency and communication, those are kind of mutual and vote environment. - Go ahead. - You know, when we jump in here, Jake? - No, I was just about to say my Andy and I think to all of that would be great. - Yeah, culture is kind of slippery for me sometimes, at least in terms of a definition, right? And I think everyone has it in their minds I think very different than when you say engineering culture or take culture. And so the way, you know, the way I try to define it is culture is the set of behaviors that we want to see and those behaviors should really be driving the values that we care most about, right? And so if you care about engineering excellence, you're going to want to see behaviors in the engineering organization that focus on platform stability, observability, right? Testing, if you care about, you know, speed of delivery, velocity, agility, you're going to want to see behaviors within the team that really promote getting things done quickly and overcoming roadblocks as fast as possible. And so, you know, in that, I think culture is certainly something that is very purpose built for each organization and there are elements of culture that apply to lots of different organizations, but really, each organization's going to have its own values and that's really should drive the behaviors that you established within the teams to really make sure that everyone has an opportunity to demonstrate those values. Something that's caught me off guard a little bit recently was really just that joining, joined this company, Kathmere, very recently and we're at the phase that we're building everything from the ground up. I am the engineering team right now. I need to go higher out with the rest of the organization. And so, every move we make, every decision we make sets the culture of the organization and even coming out of a scale up phase, start up, what I'm looking for now in the team and the values and the behaviors I'm looking for are really quite a bit different than where I was before. And so previously, we were very focused on server ability, reliability, platform, engineering efficiency, right? All these things that take an engineering organization from 50 or 100 and get it to the point of 500, right? And help you scale operations and start producing more and more product. All of that is really not relevant to launching an MVP, right? And so instead, what I'm looking for now, I found is those, you know, building an organization that deals with massive uncertainty, right? We don't have a clear product definition. Got clear vision, but don't have a clear product definition, don't have an architecture, are still working out some of the edge customer cases as well. And so, building an engineering team that can function in that environment and still produce softwares and make progress, really takes a very different set of behaviors than those that are working in a scale of organization. And so I've had to adjust my mindset quite a bit as I look for engineers to bring on the team to say, "Okay, I need to start searching not just for engineering excellence, but I need to search for this mindset that will help us get our MVP." - Just on that, Ma, I just thought, could you see yourself maybe go through an interview process with someone who's technically amazing for the position, but then maybe doesn't align so much with the values and what you say in there? And could that ultimately cost that person the job? Would you be in a position to-- - Well, that's an absolute non-starter, right? And that's really, I think, value screening is one of the very first things I do. And any organization, not just here, right? And I hate getting into a position where we fall in love with a candidate that has maybe all the technical skill sets we want, but just doesn't match the organization because they're not gonna work, right? You're gonna bring 'em on board. They're gonna be around for six months to a year and they're gonna leave because they're not happy. You're not happy. They're not meeting the time. Even though they're doing great work, it's not the great work that you want done. And so I think you have to be pretty honest with yourself early on whether or not a candidate you're speaking to really exhibits to be the values or shares the same values that you have in the organization. - Brilliant. You know, there's even bigger risk. You said they would leave. I would say they probably would not leave, right? And that's a bigger problem to have, having a wrong candidate. And now you have to get them to a point where you're gonna fire them or they would spoil the culture of the other team. - Yeah. And I think culture is one of those things that, you know, you have a culture whether or not you're intentional about it. It's kind of defined by those early leaders and employees. So it's gonna be really important at the beginning of your company to pay attention to the kind of people that you're hiring. - Definitely. - Well, yeah, just adding from my experience, quite last, much equally everybody have said, but actually interviewing for a new role, actually. So I'm actually going through a lot of different interviews. So I think first off, like the hiring manager around, they actually do kind of check on your values. Like, what's your mindset? Like, you know, that to keep you getting to the next round of like testing your technical expertise. But, and to go like this, right? I've been in a big company where they do it. They say like runs like a startup, right? You guys all hear this. So it makes sense why they want to execute like a startup. So you can move fast and everything too. No matter how many employees are, they want to break the teams out to smaller. I've been small startups where it's only few employees as well, which we also move very fast as well. So I think this is why I think a lot of companies now do always talk about being agile and trying to execute like lean, just like move fast and everything. So, but yeah, I think everyone have said so far. I think it makes up like a great culture. And that's something that when I'm interviewing, that's the first thing I asked about as well, about what the engineering coaches is like as well. And to echo what Matt was saying, like I can read the values that they have documented, right? But it's different when, you know, when you're hearing from their employees directly. So that's something I definitely want to learn more about. - Yeah. So I'll start with you then. Andi just kind of keep it moving. What would you consider a bad engineering culture for any bad experiences that you've had in toxic workplace or anything like that, maybe? - Yeah, I mean, just pretty naturally, the opposite of everything that was said. But I mean, to call out some more specific ones that I've seen, I think like empowerment, autonomy, decision making. I think I've been in environments where decisions are coming from top down or directly from like product manager, not letting the team have like a more voice and they don't think about the problem and try to solve it themselves in a way. 'Cause otherwise, you know, they're always creating like these smaller solutions that can only satisfy whatever's, where I was being asked at the time. But giving them a little more flexibility in room, I think you could like kind of build an innovation into like the early, the process earlier on software development, where I think you will have a better solution coming out of it. Yeah, I mean, I'll throw in one for now, just know. (indistinct) - Brilliant. Anyone else got thoughts on bad engineering culture? - I mean, one of the bad thing about any culture or any arc is the resistance to change or accepting the change. So that's one thing, especially when you build a startup, let's say I had you on a couple of precede stage startups and took them to like 50 plus people. Like Matt said, the early employees, they start a culture, they set a tone, they set a culture and it becomes anyone new joining. They just kind of blend into the same culture. But when you reach a point where you realize that that's not a culture, that's the culture, keep calling it culture, but that way of working is not working. So we might want to bring certain changes and there are the biggest problem is then the people have this baggage and that, but we always done it this way, but it has always been this way. No, it should not change why it should change. That's resistant to change or even trying out new ideas. That is one of the biggest problem in a startup world. And another example I'll give you is we acquired this company, smaller company and for the last two years I've been integrating it into this big arc. Kind of giving you an example of would you hire a bad culture fit? I went to actually firing who was VP of engineering before we hired this guy, before we acquired this company because he was technically, he was great. He single-handedly built this company. He's technically really excellent, but the entire team was just, he was dragging entire team down the other people because he has such a strong baggage. No, we're not gonna do that or we can't do that. So just by getting that one person out and bringing a fresh kind of mind into the team, that the team's capacity was reduced, but they were producing more and their morale was much higher. They just, everyone started contributing. They just contributing into the cross different, the back-end people were started contributing. Even in front of them, they were showing motivation to learn and pick up new things. So yeah, I'm all up for getting the right person in the place, and then it's easy to train them the technology, but it's really hard to change the culture or mindset of these people. Yeah. I did just interview a community, we're going through the same as like that. There's an older company that's worked for a while and they didn't change a new CTO joint company. I can't leave the same change. And just bringing new perspectives and fresh ways of doing that. 'Cause they've been doing the same thing over and over for more than two decades. Awesome. You know, sort of following on this, when you talk about the challenge of maybe someone who's not a great culture fit, what I've seen as a company grows is that the engineering culture does need to change quite a bit over time and that the culture that is successful in engineering at that MVP stage is not the culture that's going to be successful at scale up. And so it's not just the company that might be resistant to the shift in culture. It can be the engineers themselves, right? And the very things that you hired someone for initially and made them successful initially may actually end up being a detriment. And so it's a tough discussion to have with some engineers to sort of acknowledge that the world has changed and that there's a need for them to grow in a different direction now. And I think all the truly great engineers are able to hear candid feedback like that and take that as an opportunity to grow themselves. But it does put engineering leaders in a very uncomfortable position at times. And it does take real commitment to be intentional about the culture you wanna build in the organization because it's not the sort of thing that will happen on autopilot or if you do, it's not going to be constructive. And so I guess it's something you wanna always be aware of is whether or not your team culture is right at that time or whether or not it's something that needs to start to change. - So I agree, and following up on that, I think it's sometimes helpful to be explicit about the culture that we're wanting to create in companies. And we went through this at Price Pics as we've been growing, kind of had a series of off sites with leadership, engineering managers. And at some point, we specifically defined what our culture was because there's just that sort of like just a felt culture and then there's processes which can change all the time depending on what's going on in the organization. But just to define like what the underlying values and goals of the company where we created acronym called Use the Force. So fun, ownership, respect, communication, empathy. And we would repeat that at every engineering all hands that we had and quiz the engineers on it and make sure they understood what those values were. So, yeah, just another call out for being explicit about what your culture is and what you're trying to create at the organization that you're at. - Really? More of a question that I just kind of thought of. How hard is it to, is one thing managing culture when you're in person in an office and you're with people every single day? How difficult is it to keep a good engineering culture remotely? I imagine that brings its own problems. Just putting it out there to the group, by the way, that's not. - Let me try that. It can be, you know, but it can be hard in a sense that you're not there to observe how, you know, how they are, are they carrying that culture or how they're carrying that torch to kind of have the same values or that at the end of the day, it's all, you know, you try to set some framework that how there has to be certain processes around it, but let's just say code review practices that could be one of the code, sorry, you know, engineering culture value that every code has to pass certain, certain level of checks and balance and all those kind of things. And if people are constantly, let's say just trying to skip that, they are, they're always, the code reviews are getting, you know, they have to go back and forth. Let's say five times code reviews has to be checked. So that means they clearly are not paying attention to checking their own code before putting it onto someone else's plate. But that's not always a good engineering culture where someone is just expecting someone else to review and find problems in their code. For me, that's, that require, okay, that's, that's usually things in a remote setting. In a, in a, in an office setting that is often avoided because people are sitting in a close proximity. They just simply ask those things before even opening a PR. So that, that thing doesn't get captured very often in, in office, but in the remote setting, that will highlight more often. So you have to be extra careful and make sure you do your own due diligence before throwing it onto someone's plate. Because oftentimes these other people who are reviewing a code, they already have their own stuff. This is not their full-time job. This is edit advantage or edit, edit responsibility. Often time it comes to me as engineering leader and in a startup space, I try to review as much code as possible and try to give them the guidance and the framework instead of pinpointing changes line, change that line so they can go back and try to fit that in the framework. - Thank you very much. - Yeah, I want to add a little bit to this topic as well. So, you know, pre-pandemic, everyone was in person, right? It was in real remote culture. So like, and then became a manager managing teams. It was more natural in person, right? You see them every day, like you were saying, like saying next to each other, even like the weekly tech things. Like, you're more involved when you're in person, like saying next to each other. You can see that, you know, the demeanors and all that. You're gonna sometimes go to lunch, like just more interaction naturally in person. But since post-pandemic joined companies remotely, being in the leadership position, leading new members and me like trying to come up with a weekly tech thing is very different remotely, right? Like, people are, you know, opt out more easily in the remote environment. I'm busy and I'm not in the meeting or, you know, or sometimes they turn, you know, the camera off thing that could impact like how they're, you know, collect, you know, just working together. So definitely, I find it more challenging in remote environment for sure. Definitely you have to put in way more effort than in person, I think. But I agree that a lot of the processes can help. And, you know, one thing I really love that I felt like it worked is, you know, we do roll out like the Spotify team model. So one of the concepts like guilds really helped 'cause guilds, you could just spin up a new guild and create a topic around that guild to get more people actively, you know, talking one another. But I'm sure there's other ways I can help as well in remote environment. - Yeah, I've worked in remote environments for a long time. And I feel like, I mean, there's definitely still culture when we work remotely. I just think communication becomes so much more important. For like, we'd be voting our values at price picks every year and communication always comes up. But as one of the top ones, it's sort of our default is over communication. And then I also think, fun, again, this plays a big role in creating culture and remote environments. So we have, you know, different Slack channels for like, for babies and people that are interested in video games or investing so that we can have, you know, spin up those environments for people to connect kind of like what you'd be doing around the water cooler work. Definitely still opportunities to do that in remote environments. - Brilliant. - No, we just have a minute here. Talking about remote cultures or building culture in a remote engineering team. I think the number one most useful, powerful tool in a tool chest is writing and building a strong culture of written communication. The rigor it takes to put ideas down on paper, whether it's a design doc or a code review, providing effective feedback asynchronously and to think your comments through without hashing them out in real time, actually increases velocity in my experience quite a bit over time, but it takes quite a commitment to become effective at that. And so one of the things that's really one of the things I really focus on building into any of the teams I work with is improving the quality and the quantity of writing this down in the organization. - Thanks so much. Guys, I'm obviously conscious time. I know people have got places to be, but just to finish off, I have one question I'd like to pose to each of you and you probably weren't expecting this. I don't want to put anyone on the spot, but what advice would you give a young aspiring engineering leader or an engineer that's going to want to get it break into the engineering leadership type position? What advice would you give to them in your position now, which will help them create a better culture for their future teams? - I know, real conscious of time. I would ask that person, do they really want to be the engineering leader or the title? Or they really, really enjoy talking to the people? Because 90% of the time you would be talking to the people and rest of the time, whatever you left is actually doing some of some of the other work. But if you do not really enjoy talking to the people, really listening to their challenges and trying to find and trying to put yourself to build their professional career. And there's one of my things. I want my engineers to actually go from my teams, to be honest, I want them to grow to a level where they are able to either climb the ladder within my team if there's an open position or just look for the cross team or if the R cannot provide them opportunity, please go ahead and go. I want them to improve and if I cannot provide that, then I'm kind of failing as engineering manager. - Thank you. - I'm gonna jump in here 'cause I'm afraid I do have to drop. But, you know, because I think you hit it, right? It's whether or not someone has a passion about being a leader and are you, you know, the way I look at that is are you more interested in being successful yourself or in promoting the success of others, right? And so really look very closely at how someone spends their time and whether they have an inward or outward focus. I've never seen anyone with an inward focus be truly successful in an engineering leadership position that they have to invest in building success and capability of those around them. - So much. - Yeah, I would say that going what the others have said, developed your empathy skills, you know, as engineers responsible for getting work done as engineering managers and leaders responsible for the people who are getting the work done. It's a different way of thinking. - Awesome. - I'll just add, stay curious, just be curious, you know, like be wanting to learn more and talk to many others. I think it was only going to grow your future. - Awesome. Guys, you know, I will leave it there and quite just Matt's had to jump off and I don't want to keep you all from your day, but genuinely, thank you all so much. I know, you know, to organize something like this with people in your positions is fantastic for me personally. It's going to be great for the people to listen to, to their answers, to your answers and to learn. So just genuinely, thank you for taking the time to do this with me. Then yeah, I've found it really beneficial. I hope you guys have enjoyed it as much as you can and yeah, thank you so much. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)