Culture

If your culture only works when twelve people are in the same Slack channel, it isn’t a culture. It’s a group chat with payroll. There’s a particular kind of magic in a five-person engineering team. Everyone knows everything. Decisions happen in the corridor. The codebase is small enough to hold in your head, and so is the organisation. Then you hire person number six, and the magic starts to wobble. As it grows further, by person sixty, the corridor has become a confluence of Slack channels, and somebody is seriously proposing that you “better start documenting your values.” ...

I was recently asked as part of a recruitment conversation with someone in the talent team of a tech company, “Your CV says you foster a culture of you build it, you run it. What is your approach to building that culture?” I thought it was a great question and wanted to share my thoughts on this topic. You build it, you run it culture is all about giving engineering teams the autonomy and responsibility to own the systems they build and the agency to make decisions about how to evolve it. This level of ownership doesn’t come automatically by just telling engineering teams what to do. It requires a deliberate approach. This is what I call a High-agency team/culture. ...

This article is about how one can lead by being an enabler of experimentation and innovation without exerting authority or imposing mandates. When Generative AI tools exploded into the software engineering landscape, the reaction across my teams did not really mirror what was happening in the broader industry. The hype didn’t really inspire my engineers to explore and adopt these tools. Their negative past experience with Gen AI tools made them conclude that it was a waste of time. ...

I was curious about the title - As your team gets bigger, your leadership style has to adapt. I am not Julie Zhuo, and I am not a Vice President of an organisation just yet. But as I started working at Kaluza, leading multiple teams, I felt like I had to evolve my leadership style accordingly too. The article was reassuring as I feel like I did get some things right. ...

I was recently re-reading, actually, listening to Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s path. In one of the chapters, Camille talks about some questions to ask when hiring managers. One of those questions was — What is your management philosophy? This took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought of it myself. How would I have answered that? What is my management philosophy anyway? Philosophy By definition, Philosophy has several meanings The study of nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning system of thought based on or involving such study an underlying theory or set of ideas relating to a particular field of activity or to life as a whole In this question’s context, it is the third definition that we are looking for from the prospective managerial candidate. ...

Background I grew up as a third culture kid, born in India and raised in the United Arab Emirates. At a very early age, I had encounters with some racist kids, often while in a school bus in the lane next to mine. This altered my perception of myself, created an inferiority complex when compared to the instigators of the racist incident, and I felt helpless and trapped. The problem in the UAE was not a lack of diversity. ...

Starting as an engineering manager As an engineering manager, you already have numerous responsibilities. At an early stage in your engineering manager career, you could even feel overwhelmed by the number of things you have to know. Some of them include Mentoring and coaching your direct reports who are individual contributors Setting strategic objectives for the team and the individuals Performance management - performance improvement programs Recruiting the right engineers for your team, squad, and organization Preparing promotion packs for your engineers Liaising with the people team to ensure benefits and compensation are attractive enough for bringing in new talent Working with Product and Peers to ensure delivery is smooth and dependencies are communicated and coordinated It doesn’t end there. ...

Background I have been an avid reader since about 2016. A friend of mine at work introduced me into the world of non-fiction books. And I got hooked. Since then I have read more than a 100 books. I mean do have a life and a full time job, so I think it is pretty good that I manage to read at least 10 books a years, but 2018 was probably the year I read a lot more than the others. ...

Featured image: Photo of Group of Men Wearing Assorted Scarves Holding Sticks What is culture? You are probably tired of seeing this word mentioned in countless job descriptions and conversations in and outside your organisation. “That’s not the culture here.” Or “that’s our culture”. Or “we have a transparent culture”. Quite often this is just an abuse of the term culture. But because it is popular, it makes those making the claims feel like they work at a great organisation. ...

Featured image: Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels Preamble “Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” - Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams by Amy Edmondson, 1999. That is an impressive definition and one that is easy to understand by anyone who reads it. ...