Discussion
What does your development team’s culture look like?
"Don't fu*k up the culture," they say, for culture can break or make teams.
What does your development team’s culture look like?
At Codementor, our dev team values open-mindedness, an openness to discussion, efficiency, and integrity.
One way we foster this culture is a standing weekly lunch, where we eat lunch together and share interesting things we've learned over the past week.
Is there anything your team does specifically to build culture? What do you think would be an ideal culture for a development team?
Let us know in the comments below 👇 or in your own post.
At our office, the big boss just sleeps all day and doesn’t do anything. The other people on the team help pull his weight and they are steady workers, but they aren’t that bright and I’m left doing all of the heavy lifting and positioning to make sure we continue to move forward smoothly. It feels like we are in an endless loop.
“Culture” is a pretty squishy concept at work. It’s thrown around a lot and it means a lot of different things to different people. I think “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz does a great job of pointing out that culture is NOT just having a ping-pong table and beer at lunch - those are benefits. “Culture” is what YOUR organization does that OTHERS DO NOT - that which makes your shop unique from the many many other choices a developer might go to.
This makes the culture discussion much more interesting and about your core vision - which is really what motivates the best of people.
So at concrete5 - our vision is the web being as easy to use as pen and paper. Our mission is to help large public sector and corporate clients manage their web presences with our CMS, offering us some great revenue streams to fund a free and open source toolset for anyone. If you’re going to work with or for PortlandLabs (the company behind concrete5) as a developer - you’re going to believe in this vision.
You’re going to be passionate about bringing people together with technology and the potential that freedom of expression can deliver on. When someone is using your code without any training, and that’s letting them get their message across when they couldn’t have before - that will be something you find deeply satisfying in a way that free yoga or sushi delivery simply never will.
Much of what people call “culture” is really just base professionalism in 2017. We work from remote a lot. We test one another’s code; we lament the hard to reproduce bugs and we give a friendly hard time for the sloppy ones. We post videos & links to a #random room in Slack so they don’t get in the way of topic conversations in other rooms, but there’s still fun content or room to bitch. We take an afternoon off after a launch and have a few beers to talk about what went well and what didn’t. All this might be called “culture” by some, but it’s really no different than what any other decent shop that treats developers with respect should do.
Culture is about what makes you special amongst your peers, and deep down - that’s just going to come down to how well you have articulated a clear vision.
Great post, thanks for sharing!