Culture Is the Operating System: How Engineering Leaders Build, Scale and Renew Great Teams
Cover image attribution: The bonsai pruning person illustration is an AI-generated artwork, created from a prompt. 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 wobbles. By person sixty, the corridor has become a confluence of Slack channels, and somebody is seriously proposing that you “document your values.” ...