Learning and mentorship go a long way in strengthening an engineering team’s culture. Of course, these practices impact a business because they help the team produce better code and more efficient products. But they do so much more than that.
A dev team culture rooted in learning and mentorship helps engineers feel valued, supported and like they have agency in their careers. This type of culture increases engineer engagement, which results in 17 percent more productivity and 24 percent less turnover, according to workplace research firm Gallup.
Building a supportive team culture starts at the top. Leaders have a responsibility to put initiatives that foster skills development for their direct reports in place, like formal mentorship programs, pair programming, tech talks and more. That said, direct and long-term involvement in such initiatives is equally, if not more important.
We spoke to CTOs, VPs and engineering managers at four Austin companies to hear about the day-to-day actions and philosophies they practice to develop a culture their engineers can thrive in.
Growth for engineers on Ryan Safarian’s team at caregiver platform Care.com is based on breaking traditions, the CTO said. The leader spurs his team’s development by encouraging them to get vulnerable during feedback sessions.
Fostering Care.com’s culture of growth: We encourage vulnerability, seeing it as an act of bravery rather than weakness. Most of us have an involuntary urge to deflect and being transparent often seems foreign to new team members. But over time, it eases with exercise. As a leader, I encourage the team to practice letting their guard down so we can nurture each other’s growth. Otherwise, we’re just laying rocks on top of planted seeds.
Once we shed any false notion of invulnerability, we then start to participate in healthy debates. We more easily let our emotions and egos take a back seat to enable constructive feedback and counterargument. It’s also about taking inventory of our strengths and weaknesses to help them calibrate our actions. It could be as simple as tapping a peer for help or asking someone to rephrase a question because they didn’t understand the ask. Micro-events like these help raise the fidelity of the team.
Safarian’s mentorship strategies: We’ve all heard that management is a “push” and leadership is a “pull.” What that idea actually means is that you can’t force your hand or your will. So I’ve become more mindful of the disparate personalities and context of our environment at Care.com. Leaders are constantly navigating waves of sensitivities, underlying motivations and conflicting agendas, with the aim of putting resources in the best places for success. Leaders need to understand and adapt to the various styles and needs of the team.
Leaders need to understand and adapt to the various styles and needs of the team.”
We spent the last year shaking up our engineering culture and demanded a type of communication that did not exist before. We challenged our team and their ability to tolerate change. We encouraged innovation and creativity while enforcing a new foundation of best practices.
Developing growth through mentorship: We come together as a dynamic unit, empowering our teammates and holding each other accountable. We commit to helping our peers by extending ourselves. It’s a constant conscious effort, from CTO to intern.
In our weekly Design and Architecture calls (DnA), our engineering team engages in architectural discussions, design debates and encouragement of their colleagues as they demonstrate the latest service or application. All skill levels are welcome here and the only rule is “check your ego at the door.” Since starting these DnA calls, I’ve seen reserved employees transform into extroverts. I’ve seen challenges overcome, bars set to new heights and a passion to help each other deliver. This is where we come together and champion our growth as a single unit.
OJO Labs Executive VP of Engineering Qingqing Ouyang said she’s a fan of the book “Talent Is Overrated,” because of its argument that practice makes perfect — over a long period of time. She said she taps into this idea by acting as a soundboard to help her team leads at the real estate platform refine their communication skills.
Fostering OJO Labs’s culture of growth: Our engineers are empowered to seek knowledge, and we help them by facilitating both grassroots forums and structured coaching. Our engineering team organizes a wide variety of initiatives around technical and personal areas of focus. For instance, we have a data science lunch and learn where data scientists discuss whitepapers and topics like how vectors work in machine learning. We have tech talks where devs share how they implemented a recent product release or best practices in using gRPC or Kotlin. There’s also a technical leadership forum where engineers can discuss topics like empathy versus accountability and how to give feedback.
Ouyang’s mentorship strategies: I serve as a sounding board for mentees. I work with them to identify areas of improvement and develop a plan to practice skills over a period of time. As practice progresses, we emphasize the importance of one of our core values: failing forward. I work with mentees through failures to iterate on their individual program and work toward success.
I serve as a sounding board for mentees.”
When a tech lead in my organization stepped into a leadership role, he challenged himself to resolve issues on his team in a more timely manner. Over the years, our one-on-ones focused on how and when he needed to take action. After some time, he found the communication style that worked best for him and his teams. I was there to listen, provide feedback and offer encouragement. While he is still the same person I met years ago, he is now also a confident and decisive leader.
Developing growth through mentorship: OJO Labs’ culture of learning has created an ecosystem where engineers share their knowledge and feel fulfilled while developing technical and soft skills. Years ago, we worked closely with our people managers to train our tech leads on regularly mentoring junior team members. Through these relationships, mentees are able to expand their technical and professional skill sets while building relationships with more seasoned team members.
Managers keep a pulse on each person’s professional development through real-time feedback and one-on-one conversations. Our emphasis on peer-to-peer development helped broaden team members’ perspectives while bonding with colleagues from across the company.
Engineering Manager Matt Viteri said that when the entire dev team is bought in on advancing their learning, everyone’s individual professional development is expedited. At foodservice tech provider Sysco LABS, engineers rely on thoughtful approaches to collaborative work like pair programming to grow.
Fostering Sysco LABS culture of growth: When a team is composed of several mid-to-senior engineers capable of working independently, engineering can feel siloed, even when multiple people are working on the same project. However, we encourage pair-programming, especially when roadblocks arise. I frequently find my team grouped together on a call when one person is stuck on a ticket or trying to brainstorm a spike for the next epic. This kind of collaboration fosters good communication, which is critical for mentoring. It also enables the team to learn together and experience each other’s “aha moments.”
Viteri’s mentorship strategies: Mentorship can be technical or non-technical. My role as a manager is usually focused on the latter. Managing a mentor requires mentorship, particularly around new hires.
When a new hire joins the team, they’re assigned a mentor. With engineers who have never mentored before, it’s important to educate them on what the duty entails: setting up local environments, being a resource through the new hire’s first few tickets and other technical duties.
You can expedite learning when everyone collaborates.”
But it’s important to realize that mentoring involves additional responsibility. They should be open-minded and look for things that may not be obvious to a new team member. Mentors should also be responsive.
Developing growth through mentorship: When we think of growing teams through mentoring, we often think of hiring first. However, technical growth for existing team members is critical and can be fostered with the right culture. Some engineers are motivated to grow on their own, often during off-hours. But you can expedite learning when everyone collaborates. My team has grown because of that collaborative culture.
I have one engineer who has always had a strong front-end preference. It’s the part of the platform that she is most comfortable with. However, through pair-programming and group work, she is now much more comfortable on the back-end doing API work. She even went out of her way to further her learning with online Java courses. Now, when we have back-end-heavy epics, she contributes at a similar pace to our back-end-focused engineers.
Using a variety of avenues to knowledge-share is a key part of how Qualia CTO and Co-Founder Lucas Hansen said he encourages his team to grow. The leader said nuanced code reviews and office hours help devs at the real estate closing platform tackle challenges and evolve their skills.
Fostering Qualia’s culture of growth: One of my favorite things at Qualia is our weekly engineering talks, which are all about sharing and learning new information. While they’re educational, they aren’t always technical. The topics vary widely. We’ve learned about everything from the Kolmogorov complexity theory to models of existential risk.
It can be easy to focus strictly on work every day, but these talks are a great reminder of how interesting and diverse our engineering team is and how much we have to learn from one another. It’s been important to me since day one that we find ways to celebrate the unique perspectives each engineer brings to the team. That idea helped us cultivate a culture of curiosity and compassion. Our engineers have a thirst for knowledge and I think it makes our culture stronger as a result.
Hansen’s mentorship strategies: I helped implement team-wide office hours as a way to encourage knowledge-sharing and provide engineers with an opportunity to seek advice, learn something new or just wax philosophical about technical problems. It’s a freeform process where every day, a different engineer with their own area of expertise hosts an hour of open office hours where anyone can drop in and ask questions. I also started hosting my own office hours once a week for two hours and created a Slack channel for random engineering questions.
It’s been beneficial for us to have multiple avenues for sharing information.”
In the early days of the company, we were just a few engineers sitting in a room, so it was easy to strike up a discussion. Today, Qualia has grown to more than 400 employees and it’s been beneficial for us to have multiple avenues for sharing information. It helps the team grow overall, but it also gives our engineers an opportunity to interact with and learn from teammates they may not work with on a daily basis.
Developing growth through mentorship: We’ve always been strategic about how we assign code reviews. Newer or more junior engineers having their code reviewed by senior engineers is always good, but we find that the reverse is just as, if not more, important. Having a senior engineer’s code reviewed by someone more junior lets the junior dev see how a more experienced developer approaches a problem.
I sent one of our team leads a few pull requests and they picked specific team members to review them based on whether they felt there was something new for the person to learn. We’re tackling some complex challenges, so when we’re able to pair our junior and senior engineers, it helps pull our team closer together while quickly bringing our junior developers up to speed.
