What kind of team do you build?
Meeting a founder yesterday, he asked me what kind of engineers do I hire? What kind of things do I look for? What's the vibe of the office when you walk in? I mumbled a few things off the top of my head, but I felt pretty dissatisfied with my answer. I felt I wasn't able to articulate the nuances without being all over the place. Let's start from the top. What's the goal of the team? Create customer value. My goal is to maximize that function across short & long term. Engineers do that by writing code that works and delights customers. The word work is often overloaded. It can mean scalable, high quality, performant, extensible, intuitive, reliable, and so on. To simplify, the software works for the customer, their fellow engineers, and various other teams that make up the company. It's a team sport.
An element that's important to maximize that function is team dynamics. You're either debugging somebody else's code or writing code that's reviewed by somebody else. You're contributing to a large whole, whether it be a code base, architecture, or tech stack. It's a living organism that's constantly morphing and being sculpted. A good team dynamic is one where there is natural tension in discussing tradeoffs. Tradeoffs between optimizing for different time horizons or cycle time. A healthy team dynamic will have views and opinions. Push for high-quality decisions and do their best with the information at hand. The team will need psychological safety to speak their mind, challenge ideas, and ask for more from each other. This doesn't mean you hire a bunch of alpha, high-ego and loud individuals that will push to win at all costs. While it will result in the tension I'm talking about, it will also become a toxic environment. This would shrink the type of people that would thrive in the environment. Hampering the business's ability to scale. A necessity for every VC-backed company. Not to mention lead to rampant attrition and a revolving door of individuals. This brings up another point about team dynamics, which is longevity.
A healthy team will endure higher pain and stay together longer. Both are good things for the business. Less hiring and onboarding. The longevity would also mean the team would increase the likelihood of landing harder and more complex initiatives. Again, another advantage to have against a competing business. To achieve this longevity, every person will need to have certain needs met. They will need to feel a sense of growth & learning on some dimension. They will need to feel like they are contributing to a greater good or larger whole. Trust in leadership and their teammates. Achieve things they didn't think they could (be pushed) and enjoy themselves. People should smile once in a while, if not most days. That's not to say they won't feel waves of shame, disappointment, frustration, or anger. But they should be able to poke fun at things, lighten the mood in hard situations, or celebrate each other. Comradery! So what vibes does that lead to? A range of all human emotions. Times of serious focus on their laptop, the silence respected. People sharing stories and sounds of laughter. Moments of intense debate around a whiteboard, followed by an obsessive continuation of the discussion over a meal, be it lunch or dinner. The vibe is vibrant and cozy. The place feels worn like a dojo with quirky memorabilia that accumulated over a long period of time.
As for what makes a great engineer, it starts with a craftsman. Somebody that takes pride in their work and aspires to do better. They've got to be curious. They should be able to solve problems on their own, call out what they don't know, and ask for help when they need it. Give back, challenge others, and be passionate about something. Hardworking. Be able to lead and follow. Trying to better themselves. Take ownership of the greater good and not be above any task or individual. We all struggle with these. My goal is to assemble a cohesive team. Coach us to complement our strengths, learn and push one another, and soften our inner demons that we all have. Stumbling is ok. Stumbling and not owning up to it or putting the effort to correct is not. Stumbling too many times after repeated efforts to correct means it's not a fit. It's not personal. It could be the environment, the team, the stage of life, or a million other reasons. We all have the right to pursue happiness and to thrive. My job is to help nudge individuals there, and sometimes that means finding them a different home. Somewhere they are better suited and rewarded for their effort.
It's a vibrant dojo where a group of people work hard towards something bigger than themselves. They support each other through the pain, push each other to do better, and have fun along the way. I look for good humans who are hardworking, curious, take pride in their work, pursue personal growth, and great team players. I often take risks on people and try my best to nudge them into cohesive and successful teams.