One of my favourite podcasts is Maintainable with Robby Russell.
I just caught up with this cracker with Casey Watts, it’s all about culture and how individuals can affect this in software engineering.
A few contentious points in there for me. For example, I would definitely advise against having two backlogs for technical and functional (product) purposes but agree that technical debt needs to be on a backlog somewhere.
Additionally, I’m not a fan of regular 1-2-1s between team members, I feel that it starts off well-intentioned but becomes a death march quite quickly i.e. both parties feel like it’s something they have to do rather than they enjoy doing. I am a big fan of ‘skip levels’ where you talk to your boss’s boss but believe these should be ad-hoc and genuine and again not enforced or ‘fireside chat’ like.
Anyway, plenty to think about and a great list of ideas for team members to build culture individually which Casey has kindly shared.
Some really good ones like:
- “ask for forgiveness, not for permission”
- “lunch at your desk” or “lunch with team”?
- “no deploys on Fridays” (I love this one and it was an unspoken rule when I worked at Rabobank)
- Some interesting ones are “be actively friendly”, “be welcoming to new people” and “make it easy for people to approach you” and I know a few people who might have a problem doing that!
It’s a very thought-provoking and interesting discussion.
I suggest you check out the podcast and the presentation for more tips on building a happy culture. I’m certainly interested to find out more about Casey and his work at Happy and Effective.
Richard Bown is a writer and freelance software engineer. He is the author of HUMAN SOFTWARE a novel where small-town folk go up against AI and heartless corporate profiteering. Find out more and buy at humansoftwarebook.com
Thanks for reading this post. If you want to support my work please consider buying my book for yourself or someone you know!