Company Engineering Culture
Company Engineering Culture is a community of engineers that emerges within a company when interested individuals invest in its development.
What do you gain from having a well-developed Engineering Culture in your company?
- Increased quality and quantity of development opportunities: Often, working in a company doesn't inherently lead to personal development beyond gaining experience and problem-solving skills. To truly grow, you need to seek new information every day, filter it for quality, and study and analyze it.
- Improved communication and relationships with your teammates.
- Enhanced chances of career advancement: You'll have more opportunities to demonstrate that you not only excel at technical tasks but also possess a broad range of knowledge.
- You'll improve the competency level of your colleagues in specific areas, and they'll be able to do the same for you: This way, you'll begin to communicate on the same wavelength, understand each other implicitly, and build a dream team.
- If you're lucky, your company will invest in your development as a public engineer: This is excellent PR utilized by many well-known companies.
- You'll be able to refine your mentoring skills: An essential aspect for any employee.
Why should you (every engineer) contribute to the engineering culture?
- "Who if not you?": Often, few people actively develop the engineering culture in their company. Therefore, it's up to you to initiate this.
- But if someone else is already doing it, it doesn't mean your place is taken. If only one person engages in this, it will result in their personal blog rather than a company culture. The more people contribute, the easier it is for you and them to derive maximum benefit.
- In this process, you develop your colleagues, but primarily, you develop yourself—just start, and you'll feel it.
How to begin developing Company Engineering Culture?
- Engineering Playbook: Need I say more?
- Internal #engineering-knowledge-sharing channel: You need a channel where everyone can post any information useful for engineers of your profile, and others can discuss this information in threads.
- Knowledge sharing sessions: To truly teach and convey all your (and not only your) thoughts to a group of people, it's not enough to just throw a collection of links to books, videos, articles, etc., at them. You need to gather these people together, ensure they're listening to you, and start sharing your knowledge. Then, answer all their questions and share all accompanying literature.
- Start a public channel or blog with your colleagues: When you see that not only you but also many other people are interested in the information you're sharing, the process will accelerate significantly.
- Try to speak at conferences: Conferences are one of the best ways for an engineer to grow. I'm sure you and your entire team or company will find this experience very rewarding.
- Collaborate with colleagues to develop open-sourced packages: It's useful, it's public, it's interesting, it's fun.
- Mention tech results on a sprint/monthly basis: If you're a leader, you can create a channel where you'll publish the results of each engineer for a sprint or a specific period. This way, your work will be more transparent to managers, you'll have recorded the entire history of your team's work, and you'll motivate each other with your own results.