Give Me a 10x Eng Culture, or Give Me Death

"What do we have here, sir?" "A culture of 10x engineers, if you can keep it."

I was on a walking tour once in an old town in Europe.

As we passed buildings, the guide pointed out the local city monument signs.

This person lived here. This battle was fought there. This church was built then. And on and on.

Someone raised their hand to ask, "All these monuments, are they protected by UNESCO? The UN's special protection of world monuments?"

The guide stopped walking and turned around, lowering their voice, "No, there's no UNESCO protection of any of these monuments."

"But, how do they remain preserved then?", the anxious tour participant pleaded.

"These monuments are protected by the people of the town, as they have always been.
Each do their part to protect what's been passed down to them."

Turning back to walk again, the guide continued the tour.

Whether monuments or culture, most are not protected by UNESCO.

And even the ones that are, risk ruin if the local populations are not all working together to ensure their survival.

The engineering culture passed down to new hires should be seen in the same light.

In the best cases, they receive a 10x engineering culture, now theirs – if they can keep it.

“Well, Doctor, what do we have, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic, if you can keep it.” – Benjamin Franklin

For others, they receive an engineering culture warts and all, that with enough time and effort they could help improve, smoothing out the rough edges, and fanning the flames of ambition which banish apathy.

Or they could let it continue to rot away, continuing the slow trend towards stalled velocity and business failure.

Today, we do a deep dive on engineering culture, what is it, how to build one, how to preserve one, and the cost to your ability to build wifi-money and escape if you don't.

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Forming an Engineering Culture

Like any culture, an engineering culture is the implicit embedding of values, ways of doing things, slogans, technical opinions, amongst a group of people.

For startups, this may entirely overlap with that of the team since the team of 5 or 10 engineers is the entire engineering organization.

But for most larger W2s, the engineering culture sits beyond the team, in the best case capturing and setting as de facto the values, practices, and opinions that should be shared across all teams, regardless of domain.

While companies are small, say under 100 engineers, the right charismatic senior engineers can set the culture. During all hands meetings, pair programming with new engineers as they join, and ensuring that other senior engineers are aligned on the same values and practices, a culture can be set which has vast synergetic benefits given the shared context that all engineers now can operate within.

For companies that manage to retain their founding engineers, setting culture can be much easier. Initial hires onboard with the founding engineers directly. Once trained and inculcated, when they onboard future new hires, there is minimal loss of culture in the next generation hired.

In a tiny team, differences get ironed out quickly and aren't allowed to fester, in contrast to how they can more easily grow in a huge team where everyone is spread thin and few have the time, influence, or authority to chastise a new hire for their foreign values or behavior.

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If you can keep it

Unfortunately, few engineering leaders consciously think about culture in a non-LinkedIn, non-cringe, pragmatic way.

Sure, the LinkedIn cucks will prattle on about culture for hours if you let them – especially if they are holding a microphone on some panel on stage, but few know how to form, let alone preserve, a high functioning 10x engineering culture.

Without a 10x engineering culture, your company surely will slowly die mired in slowing velocity, productivity, and growing insurmountable levels of tech debt, with your 10x engineers jumping ship like rats quarter after quarter.