Engineering Culture

Creating, maintaining, and identifying

​

a high quality technical environment

by Slava I. Maslennikov

I am Slava

• CPP SWIFT/FAST mentor 4 years
• SRE Manager 4 years
• US, Armenia, India, UK, Ireland
• SRE/DevOps/Cloud 10 years
• Business owner 1 year

​

• Ham operator 9 years
• Orange cat owner 5 years
• CalPoly Pomona C.S. dropout

aka

partyhorse

slobber

https://slava.lol

Robert Paulson

Leslie Claret

Why are you here?

As an engineering manager,

how do I maximize

a fulfilling environment

for my reporting engineers?

Why does it matter?

Leaders will

​

• Retain talent
• Grow existing engineers

​

• Reduce turnover
• Reduce toil costs

​

When ICs

​

• Actually enjoy work

​

• Get rewarded fairly

Good engineering culture

​

starts and ends with the

​

Engineering Manager.

1. Understand needs

2. Satisfy needs

…reduce costs

What

needs

are

there?

Communication

Daily

routine

Growth

$

Example

Communication

I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS

I’M GOOD AT DEALING WITH PEOPLE

Communication

The good and the bad of every day

​

​

Interactions with:

• Peers
• Direct manager
• Adjacent teams
• Upper leadership

Risky interactions:

• Conflict
• Decisions

​

Qualities:

• Respect
• Value
• Purpose

Communication

Does your company have:

​

• A regular feedback loop?
• Regular communication between global teams?
• Regular knowledge-sharing sessions?

Does upper leadership invest in

people management skills

for people managers?

​

Communication

Do:

• Host lunch-and-learns
• Hold regular 1:1s
• Translate purpose
• Grow leadership skills
• Motivate towards goals

Don’t:

• Avoid conflict
• Make decisions quietly
• Cascade words down

Daily Routine

1. Ease of engineering
2. Bureaucracies
3. Focus time

Daily Routines #1: Ease of engineering

• Research and development
• Share findings

Daily Routines #2: Bureaucracies

Painful but necessary for business:

• Time sheets
• Tracking PTO

Facilitate it

Automate it

Simplify it

Every extra step in a process

adds risk of someone

not following the process.

Daily Routines #3: Focus time

Dangers to focus time:

• Meetings
• Queries
• Context switching

2 x 50% = 100%

2 x 50% = 120%

4 x 25% = 100%

4 x 25% = 200%

Daily Routine

• How does an engineer create a fresh development environment?
• Do you use engineer-friendly systems?
• What’s your effort level of automating regular processes?
• What’s your policy and documentation like?
• Are internal meeting times made flexible?
• Is there a feedback loop for engineer satisfaction?

Daily Routine

Do:

• Simplify, automate processes
• Gather feedback on systems
• Consolidate policies
• Enable focus time

Don’t:

• Make engineering difficult
• Create process for process
• Add people to bad meetings

Growth

Skills the engineer can take home:

• Technical
• Business
• Social

Visible over quarters or years

Visible to

• Self
• Peers
• Leaders

Comes from:

• Motivation
• Clarity of business needs
• Feedback
• People managers

Growth

Internal:

• Bringing in large clients
• Knowledge-sharing sessions
• Creating novel IP
• Certifications

External:

• Blog posts
• Meetup talks
• Conference attendance
• Github activity
• Promotions
• Certifications
• LinkedIn posts

​

Growth

• Is there a regular feedback loop that test People Management skills?
• Does upper leadership have clear buy-in for growth?
• Are engineers both internally and externally visible?
• Are engineers enabled to be visible?
• Are there L&D funds available?

Growth

Do:

• Have 1:1s
• Motivate
• Make L&D easy
• Make engineers visible
• Join lunch-and-learns
• Diversify growth

Don’t:

• Be the manager with unknown engineers
• Lock down common knowledge

Compensation

Engineers talk about their salaries

internally & externally

..and they should!

• Levels.FYI
• H1B Salary Database
• GlassDoor

Most valuable engineers:

​

• Confident
• Skillful
• High business acumen

​

Are the best at

​

1. Growing
2. Interviewing
3. Leaving

Compensation

Market change

is not a good reason

for different salaries

for same work.

​

​

​

If you have the client flow

to hire new engineers

you have the cash flow

to pay market salaries.

Uncertainty can be mitigated with

​

• Contractors
• Bonuses
• Stock

Compensation

• Do your managers have control of their reports’ salaries?
• Does your organization have fair reasons for disparities in compensation?
• Do engineers’ raises have clear parity with merit?

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Compensation

Do:

• Unify performance reports
• Provide clear leveling

Don’t:

• End up with wide salary ranges
• Make leadership the only path

Feedback loop

Do:

• Be regular
• Collect anonymously
• Restrict access
• Discuss widely
• Be honest
• Be empathetic
• Encourage

Don’t:

• Set and forget
• Trust one story
• Ignore a tech/leader side
• Get stuck in emotion

Bring it home

• Change comes from all levels
• Treat individuals as such
• Erin Meyer, The Culture Map
• Sell what’s important

Q&A

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Thank you!