Engineering your culture: How to keep your engineers happy

We all know how difficult (and expensive!) it is to convince brilliant engineers to join our team. The real challenge starts on Day 1 – What can we do to keep them happy and engaged?

After all, "Bored people quit".

If you know you should do better but ran out of ideas how - come on down! We'll talk about how to make their 1st day at work memorable, how to help them build a personal brand, how to figure out and sell our unique strength as a company (GitHub-style), why we should bring them to investors' events and plenty more.

In this talk I'll share 8 tips you could apply to build happier engineering teams.

P.S. If you enjoyed these slides, you'll enjoy my book - leadingsnowflakes.com

Transcript

1. @ “No  were harmed in the making of this talk” – said no one, ever. Until now.
3. Photo credit: Mike Kepka
4. AirBnB Photo credit:
6. clickypix Photo credit:
8. Photo credit: yiyinglu
9. “ Photo credit: Facebook
16. We’re beautiful snowflakes
17. Full-stack Engineer @ Commerce Sciences I write at Lnbogen.com I tweet @orenellenbogen You can call me bogen. It’s kinda short, like me. Pronounced: BOO-GEN
18. SoftwareLeadWeekly.com LeadingSnowflakes.com
19. SoftwareLeadWeekly.com - 14 months - 65 weeks in a row - 7 recommendations / week - 455 recommendations so far - 30-40 posts digested / week - 2,600 posts so far - 500-800 words / post (roughly) - 52-60 books The only logical conclusion then?
22. photo credit bennylin0724
23. • Amazing mission statement organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful • Hard to iterate fast (process heavy) • Incredible technology MapReduce, Google FS etc.
24. • Awesome mission statement make the world more open and connected • Fast iterations, small teams • Great technology (+ leftovers) PHP – I’m looking at you!
25. • Some lame mission statement make more money than the church • Fast iterations, small teams • Great technology, at huge scale!
27. (your engineers)
28. Explicitly hire for: People who can prioritize & get things done on their own They focus on autonomy
33. Changing code -> … -> something breaks -> lack of trust -> slower cycle (process++) -> new department of [trust issue] -> still breaks … -> death (of happiness)
36. Changing code -> … -> something breaks -> quick release + retrospect -> automate/test stuff -> still breaks -> quick release + retrospect -> automate/test stuff -> …
40. http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-hubspot-culture-code-creating-a-company-we-love http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
43. “ Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. WTF?
46. The last person to join the company is responsible to create a “starter kit” for the next one to join
51. VP SEO at TripAdvisor
54. Onboarding process for Google’s building blocks
55. Scaling your DNA
56. Scheduling time for non-urgent tasks https://medium.com/life-at-obvious/3231f644a8b1
57. “ One day I will work for a company that does something like this. ”
59. https://github.com/EverythingMe/redash
62. http://randsinrepose.com/archives/bored-people-quit/
63. Source: http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2013/12/fun-at-work.html Experience distribution should fit existing problems
64. Junior Engineers Practice, practice, practice Experienced Engineers Practice, lead, build trust Veteran Engineers Become an expert or pivot (+mentor as a Bar Raiser)
68. photo credit bennylin0724