Most tech startups are born from some of the first engineers who built the company's initial product. As those first builders work together, they begin to establish a developer culture, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.
At Summit Web Lisbon in November, two founders discussed the importance of building a developer culture that is distinct from a company's overall culture.
According to Shensi Ding, co-founder and CEO of Go, a unified API startup, the early developer ethos is particularly important within tech startups, where engineers ultimately control how the product is built and what is prioritized. She says her co-founder, CTO Gil Feig, worked to set a positive tone early on that strengthened the team.
“It really instilled in us from the beginning that engineers can, from the beginning of the project, decide that we can do anything. It simply depends on how much time you want to dedicate to a particular task. And we really wanted to instill that in the developer culture from the beginning,” he said.
Ludmila Pontremolez, CTO and co-founder of zippy, a Brazilian fintech startup, spent time as an engineer at Square before launching Zippi. He wanted to create a team-centric atmosphere: regardless of who writes the code, everyone is responsible for it. "Every mistake someone makes is everyone's responsibility," he said. "When something is broken in production, on Sunday at 1 am, it's probably not the person who wrote the code who is going to fix it, but whoever is in charge of taking care of the servers at that time."
“So we instilled a lot of that community thinking and how we write code for everyone on the team. It's not just a question of whether you should build something faster. It’s about what legacy you’re leaving.”
Ding said that since she and Feig were engineers before building Merge, they wanted to create an atmosphere in their company where taking individual initiative was encouraged and where all engineers owned the product collectively. “In the beginning, something we really tried to do was lead by example. . . . We would set expectations, as if you could make these decisions for us. And we also talked a lot about what the impact of what they were doing was because we really wanted to lay the foundation from the beginning that they weren't just going to be takers and doers. They were going to be an integral part of the company,” she said.
An important part of creating that culture is making sure the group is diverse, and the sooner that happens, the better. Ding said, especially as a woman, she deliberately wanted to create a tolerant and accepting environment.
“I've definitely been in companies where, as a young woman, you say something and you feel like people think you're stupid or don't respect what you say,” she said. "And I really want to make sure that everyone in the company creates a great environment for young women and others to feel comfortable saying whatever they want."
When hiring, it's important to find and recruit diverse candidates, but that alone is not enough, Ding said. “You can't attract people and expect them to change the environment. First of all, you have to have a great environment for them,” he said.
As a startup grows and other areas of the business begin to take shape, the engineering team becomes a more distinct group and, as such, has to define its own culture within the broader organization. Part of that is building your own ways to drive more efficient work.
Regardless of which workflows are implemented, adjustments will continually need to be made as the group grows. “I don't know if I have a perfect answer to finding a unique way of working. “I’m sure our processes fail all the time,” she said. So they keep trying new ways of working, knowing that at some point they will need to be adjusted again. "I think it's really difficult for companies to find a single process that will grow with them over time."
Pontremolez says his company recently wrote down its development values and what it believes in a software engineering manifesto to help new engineers understand how they fit when they join. But he says that at the stage he doesn't necessarily want to set hard and fast rules. "I think the hardest part of the ratings process is separating out people who do things that aren't what you want and not turning those episodes into rules that apply to everyone."
For example, she said that if someone doesn't implement code correctly, you don't necessarily need to make a rule that developers can no longer implement it independently, something she would consider an overreaction to a single incident. It's important to balance the needs of the entire company, especially at an early stage, with the rules and processes you implement.
But Pontremolez says that as more people are added, it's important to help them "connect the dots" between engineering and what the startup is trying to achieve, so they understand how their contributions fit into the organization's overall goals.
What is clear is that building a developer culture never ends. As the company grows and goes through different stages, the development group will have to adapt to each new reality, and founders or other managers will have to help facilitate this.
