How to elevate engineering culture at large corporations?

How to elevate engineering culture at large corporations?

• One thing I have realized working at a large corporation is that it doesn't matter how smart you are because if everyone else doesn't see the value in what you are doing then you are not going to get very far. It's much harder to convince 1000 people that a certain part of the software stack should be in groovy than it is to convince 10 people of the same thing. I'm curious how people go about elevating the engineering culture at large corporations because I've been running into walls left and right and I would like to be more proactive about how I go about it. I have been advocating tech talks and tech demos along with code reviews as potential solutions. Do people have other suggestions? Note that 1000 people and groovy are just representative examples. I am not married to groovy or any other language and 1000 people is meant to indicate large scale and how to go about teaching a large group of people about best practices and engineering principles in general.

• Answer:

  It is certainly possible and doable but it takes a very different kind of skill than technical prowess. Optimistic Likable Attitude An optimistic attitude is infectious. Most people are scared of change and a decent number of engineers in large organizations are lower skilled and have found a niche they can hide in. Others still have bad intentions. Optimistic attitudes can help smart yet conservative minded engineers have confidence to try something new. Further still if you are a likable optimistic person then people are more likely to look up to you as a technical leader. The technical leaders that other engineers follow and respect do not necessarily have to be because of a sanctioned title. Find the smartest guys Figure out the smartest most capable engineers in the group and try running your ideas by them. Allow them to include their own ideas and always be open minded. Brainstorming sessions should encourage everybody to come forward with any ideas they have no matter how stupid they are. Sometimes stupid ideas evolve into great ones if it catches on. Once you sell this group they can be your marketers to sell to others. When you have a huge number of engineers you are not going to have the time to "convince" all of them yourself. Get smart influential people behind your ideas and they will sell it for you, and again remember, ignore titles. Some surprisingly pessimistic or incompetent people can wind up with prestigious titles based on politics or tenure. Be Realistic It is one thing to introduce a code review policy, it is quite another to talk about introducing a new technology stack that few people in house are qualified in. Write down a number of ideas you would like to see implemented and see if you can break these bigger milestones into smaller more easily achievable goals. No matter how small the goal, you and your evangelists will feel inspired and driven by each small success you make. Change will take time. When you want to turn a large oil tanker around, then it takes a long time for the ship to swing around, but it all starts with turning the wheel. Write Documentation, a LOT of Documentation! It will take a lot of work to get the common engineers to follow you, and unless you make it easy for them to transition to a new process or technology then you will find that your strategy will fizzle out. You are building change from the bottom up which means you need to win adoption by the bottom tier. The power of the bottom tier of engineers is such that they can even derail high level directives (top-down change) if it is too hard or they don't believe in it. Writing technical documentation, no matter how basic you may think it seems, is important to win this adoption. Focus the document on how these new technologies and processes might play or look in the organization. Give examples, write prototypes and proof of concept applications. Don't expect too terribly much from your evangelists in this regard. Most of them may have no problem supporting it or understanding it, but when it comes to doing tedious hard work they may disappear. Most important of all, nobody likes a know-it-all so try to be transparent in your documentation. Make the documentation seem to be authored by the group rather than by yourself. Invite even simple small edits by others to get their names on the revision history of such documents so they seem like a collaborative effort. When the draft is complete, see if you can get your manager to form a committee of representatives from the group to discuss and approve the documents. This will give your documentation and standards that you set forward have legitimacy. It is certainly possible and something I have had much success in. These are some of my most proud accomplishments in my career.