The document discusses key aspects of engineering culture at startup companies. It emphasizes that culture, such as how teams work together and communicate, is more important than superficial practices like free food or tools. Specifically, it recommends hiring for cultural fit, prioritizing teams over individuals, over-communicating transparently, providing honest feedback, embracing change through quick iterations, and learning from failures.

1. Startup Engineering Culture
What Matters and What Does Not

2. Mohan Krishnan, Tommy Sullivan
• Working at KMKLabs for 2.1574 years
• Full-stack engineers
• Love writing software
Senaru, Lombok

3. KMKLabs.com/careers
Get in on this action!

4. WARNING!
• Anecdotal - our experience and theirs
• What works for us and them
• We don't do everything right
• Love to know what works for you

5. Culture

6. – Peter Thiel to Brian Chesky
paypal airbnb .
“Don’t f*** up the culture.”

7. Culture eats strategy for breakfast - Peter Drucker

8. Not culture,
practices
• Free food
• Rock climbing walls
• Cool posters
• Agile / Lean
• Programming
languages
• Tools
• Code standards…

9. Engineering culture:
• How we work together
• How we build things
• How we fail & ensure growth

10. Working together

11. Hiring
• People you want to
work with
• Team decides
• Cultural fit trumps
competency

12. Team over the individual
• startup is a team sport
• strong teams >
individual heroes
- heros burn out
• no toxic behavior, even
if you are a 10x
engineer
• cover for each other
“When the year starts the
objective is to win it all with
the team, personal records
are secondary.”

13. Over Communicate
• Transparent
• Self-organization
• Honest

14. morning standup

15. pair programming

16. evening show & tell

17. Honest
• Constructive feedback
over being “nice”
• Criticism is always valid
from their perspective

18. Transparency allows for self organization

19. Managers are servants to teams
• primary function:
facilitates, communicates,
coordinates
• needs to be taught &
inculcated
• not the only way to
progress career wise
• not every great engineer
will make a great manager

20. How we build things

21. Optimize for quick iterations
• Small frequent releases
• Embrace change
• Work with product to
phase features in small
parts
• TDD, Continuous
Integration & Deployment

22. Don’t drop engineering standards
• Professionals: zero
tolerance for bad code
• Shit code vs strategic
tech debt
• Quality is engineering
responsibility
• Challenges are not a
reason to throw away
standards

23. Boring over shiny technology
• Boring: mature technologies / tech already in your
production
• Develop deep competency in your production
stack
• Focus on the business, avoid hype
mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology-slides

24. Gartner Hype Cycle *
balance: allow for trying new technology by
ensuring we architecture for experimentation
chrisunderwoodsblog.com/2014/01/new-deal-trough-or-plateau
nginx, postgres
php, ruby
mongoDB
soap
nodejs, go

25. Avoid burnout
• We want people to have multi year careers
• Need work-life balance

26. Productivity vs hours worked
• 8 hours of productive
work > 16 hours of
some work, Facebook,
email, etc…
• Strict work hours
ensure strict free time
twitter.com/joshsusser/status/652540877160603648

27. How we fail & ensure growth

28. Never the same mistake
• Cover every bug with a test
• Post-mortems for incidents or downtime
• Regular retrospectives
😃 😕 😩

29. Invest for the future
• People
- 1:1 feedback
- mentoring
- training, Akademi KMK
• Community
- Participating
- Facilitating Events
- This!

30. “Thank you!”