In 2013-15 many people were looking up to how Netflix or Spotify built their dev culture and how they operated and developed their products.
What companies are setting current trends now (in 2022-23)?
EDIT: I know that 'amazing culture' can mean different things to different people. I'm interested in examples of the companies that are setting the current trends how development should be done. Structure of teams, CI/CD, pipelines, responsibilities, tooling, day-to-day working methodology (product management probably too).
Of course this judgement is subjective - I'm fine with that.
[0] https://handbook.airbyte.com/
[1] https://posthog.com/handbook
edit: addendums
We're already starting to see examples of these differences in the thread started by @JonChesterfield; I'm sure others will pop up.
The only conclusion I can draw so far is that interviewing the employer remains as important as ever. Don't just write off a company because of what you see online, just have a 30 minute chat.
Wasn’t sure if it’d be for me at first, as it’s so different from where I was before. Previous company I was at, great social culture (pre-COVID), very nice people, but very top down decision making. Also nobody ever got let go (or even really talked to) for performance reasons, very easy place to coast. Some people referred to the culture as “toxic positivity”, which is a pretty good description. Really, the only way people got let go was at mass layoffs every 2 years or so, but between layoff people could dog it and nobody would say anything. Overall it was socially fun, but work wise extremely slow, inefficient and bureaucratic. I have lots of good memories from that place, but I don’t think it was an EFFECTIVE company culture.
At my current, “Netflix inspired culture” company, there’s a lot less process, a lot more personal responsibility, and an expectation of high performance. People who aren’t contributing enough are quickly told, and if they can’t turn it around, let go. I thought it might feel too harsh/cold for me, but I actually really like the culture. Low process, high productivity, and you can trust basically all your teammates to be high quality contributors and decision makers. I feel more pride in my team and what we’re building. Social aspects are definitely not as fun as at my last co., but I do think a fair bit of that is the post-COVID world, hard to have a really social/fun company culture when most people are remote most of the time.
10 years ago there was a huge focus on structuring engineering teams in ways that made it so that individual engineers did not matter. There were also tons of dependencies between teams as you would have "Systems Engineers", "Devops Engineers", "DBAs", "Data Scientists" etc. etc.
Web work was also relatively new, and few leaders actually had a handle on how much time things would take. Functional splits lead to teams making poor assumptions on other team's efforts, and agile produced cancerously bad software cultures.
My experience in 2023 is that few teams maintain any agile concepts outside of daily stand-ups/weekly syncs. Teams are generally functionally integrated, and have a more or less date oriented culture depending on how annual goals are set and how you make commitments to customers. Cloud computing, improved test infrastructure/expectations, CI/CD, and maturity have dramatically changed development culture industry wide.
Is this an a-typical experience? I can't think of the last time I saw a project with a date that the engineer hadn't set.
I doubt we're setting trends. It's just a lovely place to work. https://www.aha.io/
And even if you found an amazing team, all it takes is one re-org for the team to be ruined.
Generally I’ve found them to be smallish companies with a track record of growth (“uninterrupted prosperity”) and a culture that values the holistic good (i.e. has buried the exclusive focus on shareholders) and comes from the top.
Something like:
- you don't get paged when things break
- it's possible to ship to production within, say, a month
- there's a sane CI system in place
- there's no product owner between you and the customer
- at least partially remote working is OK
(@op perhaps you could clarify what would qualify as amazing culture? I suspect the bar is higher than the above)
It doesn't seem to be updated very often though with resources so I am collecting a static list of such companies in case anyone is interested to explore. Obviously it won't fit across the bill but some of the criteria:
- Product-led
- Known for excellent engineering culture
- Outcome oriented
- Remote
- Invest in professional development
- Neither chaotic or beauracratic
- Sustainable & profitable