Senior management should make engineering culture a top priority and create the framework which supports building a good engineering culture. You need values for culture to evolve, supported by rules that govern how things are done.
Senior management should make engineering culture a top priority and create the framework which supports building a good engineering culture. You need values for culture to evolve, supported by rules that govern how things are done.
Manu Cupcic, Senior Staff Development Lead at Criteo, spoke about Evolving the Engineering Culture @Criteo at QCon London 2017. InfoQ is covering the conference with Q&As, summaries and articles.
Engineering culture is more than values; it should also include a set of rules that govern how we do things, said Cupcic. His definition of engineering culture is:
A process to make distributed decisions.
We make a lot of decisions, which makes it important to look at how we make them. Top down decision making doesn’t scale, argued Cupcic. Things change fast in our industry, so we need agility to be able to make decisions quickly.
The recipe for the culture is very lightweight at Criteo. There is no central place in the organization that is responsible for evolving the culture, and they have a « framework » to « guide » the evolution. Cupcic stated: « We accept that trying to evolve the culture from a central place is futile; culture is inherently distributed. »
At Criteo there is a think tank of engineers and managers; a sounding board for new ideas. They meet bi-weekly and anyone can join by booking a time slot to present and discuss a topic.
