Engineering Culture, or...
I am not a fan of saying: there is (no) Engineering Culture at a company.
All companies that build software have some Culture of Engineering. Because they all engineer solutions.
Also, all companies have some Culture of Product, Culture of Sales and Marketing, Culture of People, Culture of Quality, and Culture of X.
However, understanding which (sub-)culture drives the company forward is essential. Which beats the other when a thought decision is to be made?
I worked for companies driven by Engineering, the other ones were driven by Marketing and Sales, the other ones by Product, and the other ones by Business.
Always, there is the strongest one. It is a Driving Culture. The one that holds a steering wheel, while the other ones sit on the passenger seats. Driving one shapes the Culture Of The Company most robustly.
Sometimes, a Driving Culture changes. Because “What Got You Here Won't Get You There”.
And…
I like what Basecamp’s founder wrote about it:
Culture simply happens. It's emergent behavior. There's nothing to do, it just is.
A company's culture is a 50-day moving average. It's what you've been collectively doing as a company over the last 50 days.- Jason Fried
This is a good point, Rafal. It reminds me of an interesting story.
I joined a company as VP Eng a few years ago which I immediately found to be very sales-driven. I also noticed that the tech team hardly shipped anything for months. When I put 2+2 together, I realized that one thing was leading to the other. Essentially, the company adapted to the lack of product development by simply trying to sell the sh*t out of what they had.
We managed to find and address many of the bottlenecks in the tech team, and we started shipping updates regularly. And the company also adapted to that by, for example, developing its product marketing function (which became a new need.)
I guess the idea here is that the dominant culture a) has a reason for being that way and b) it's not set in stone.
Thanks for your post that made me reflect on this!