I want to talk about Engineering Culture.

Yes… I’m cross-posting word for word from LinkedIn, if you saw it there.

Let me first preface by saying that my team is amazing. They’re a pool of some of the most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. When I started here, I experienced the biggest and longest stretch of imposter syndrome that I’ve ever experienced in my career. It is an absolute pleasure to work with, learn from and grow with this team.

With that said, I believe that Engineering Culture is not something that just *exists* or something we can say, “This is how it is” and let it be. I think Engineering Culture is much like tech debt. There will always be tech debt. Every project results in some corner being taken that will need to be addressed at some point in the future. Every product has dependencies that must be kept up to date. The issue with tech debt isn’t that it exists, but that it’s not constantly worked on. Then the tech debt starts to mound up and the pile gets ever more difficult to cut through. In the same way, Engineering Culture will start to rust if not properly maintained. When corners are cut, if steps aren’t taken to correct that, then it will sit and fester and eventually become part of the culture. With every decision made in the organization, Engineering Culture is impacted one way or the other. Good decisions lead to cleansing and improvement. Poor decisions lead to diminished culture until it has eventually turned to rot.

We have to keep working on Engineering Culture. It’s not going to “just get better”, just like that mountain of tech debt isn’t going to “just go away”. We have to dedicate time and resources to keeping it in check. So when you cut corners, figure out why the corner needed to be cut and find a way to fix that. Don’t let the hits to culture sit and fester, because they’ll eventually destroy the whole thing.

TLDR; Engineering Culture is tech debt and we need to allocate resources to keep it healthy.