building good engineering culture w/ chris rathgeb

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. So that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it for it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at tdssentysen finally. Please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. who are you, what do you do, and we'll go from there. Yeah, well, thanks for having me, Taylor, and glad to be here. My name is Chris Arathkiv. I am the CTO of a startup called CUREMIT. We are in the dental space.

We do dental procurement, cost management technologies. Me personally, I'm a software engineer. been doing software engineering for the last 20, 25 years, as long as I can remember at this point. I love what I do. And that is evident. I just I love what I do. So and then Nicole it's great to see you LinkedIn user. Good morning, Taylor Welcome, Chris. We are we are international this morning from Nigeria. I love it. It's great to see you, man. So Chris, so let's go ahead and dive in. And Chris and I were chatting off air and Chris has a bunch of great thoughts on a lot of different things.

And so I want to start a little bit early today because we have so many thoughts and I want to hear Chris just kind of spill it. But the first thing I want to talk about Chris is good engineering culture. I think the more I've interviewed hiring managers and senior level leadership like yourself on the show, the more I realize it's not perfect. It's really hard to do. I think engineers are a different breed, especially after recruiting them for a while. So, just give me some general thoughts just to kick it off on how to build good engineering culture. Oh man. I think that it really depends and starts with values.

Like that's the beginning of it. I think you gotta have good, solid values for your company, where you can kind of build an engineering culture. I think that when you know who you are and what your identity is as a company, you can represent that and you live it authentically and you can represent that in what you do, then it becomes a beacon for people that want to, who maybe have similar values. And align with the way you think about different aspects, you know, at CURMIT, for example, you know, we've got the, you know, our values are team first, maniacal pursuit towards greatness, we want people who want to grow, you know, compassionate candor, we want to be honest about where we're at, diversity is more than a word, have fun, little things matter, these are our values.

And I think that when looking at people, we talk about our values during our hiring process. And I think that as a result, we find people who kind of align with these values. And that's kind of like the starting point. I love that. Well, and you answered the question I was about to ask about, we talk about values a lot. What are some things you're doing within your organization you already answered it, which is great. Let me ask you this. I think one of the biggest issues that I see when it comes to the engineering culture, is there's a lot of me, right? I think it's difficult to build high-performing engineering teams because at the end of the day, I think there are some engineers out there that have egos that want to be right.

I think their solution is the best solution. So how do you balance that with getting like good talent but then also having them kind of accept your values. Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that is really important there is defining success, like what success looks like on your team. I think this is probably one of the biggest, in my career, probably one of the biggest swing in a miss that most engineering organizations I've been a part of, absolutely miss on. And, you know, the ramifications of missing on this are you end up with engineers who kind of do what they want and the way that they want or you end up in a situation.

And I'm talking to everybody out here who's listening in, have you ever been in a company where, you know, things seem to be going well, but then out of the blue, they're like, we're going to let you go. And it's like, why? Like, what did I do? Right? Like, I don't understand. It's about to say all day in time, but I haven't gotten that, but I've heard that all the time. Like, and to me, it's a function of defining success and being explicit about it, right? Like, talking about what does it look like to be successful on this team and putting intentional thought into that.

And this is a thing that we've done, and I think it's been very, very powerful. And we've done it, unfortunately, it's been a learning process, right? We were that company at the, that was like, you know, not doing a good job of defining success. And, you know, it resulted in, you know, maybe not the best experiences for people working with us. And we learned hard lessons and have adapted and grown over time. And now one of the things that we do is, you know, we, we have very clear and like explicit like definitions of success in a role. It talks about different like 11, there's 11 different like points.

We put a lot of thought into this. I was about to ask, we don't have to go super granular, but like, can you give me like one example of what a success looks like on your team? Yeah, so you know, 11 different points. We've got team engagement, things like participating in team discussions, engaging in our team Slack channels, jumping into Assistant others and when they need help, presenting dissenting opinions, things like that. We've got planning and estimation, and that's that ability to document what you're gonna do, be intentional about it. We expect people to create build plans and execution plans and estimate what it's gonna take to do that.

Being very clear about time management and intentionality, not getting dragged down rabbit holes that we're not necessarily planning for, and creating process around, okay, that's not to say that this is not important. Like let's document it and be intentional about when we chase down these rabbits. Maybe this is very, very important. And actually you discovered this, that's great progress tracking. We expect people to kind of keep their tasks up to date, to be pruning their plan regularly, updating it, communicating those updates to people, showing off the workers, they go just really, really defining each of these things. Issue management is another one of the areas where we've come in and we've talked a little bit about, we wanna know about issues.

Issues are important. They're the kinds of things that can manifest and blow up and cause a lot of, if they go unnoticed, they can cause even, they can grow and fester and become even worse issues. And so we define, we wanna help people on the team grow and be able to recognize issues more quickly and resolve issues that are within their power to resolve and surface them to other stakeholders when it's kind of not in their power to resolve. That's awesome. Defining what it means for work completion, documentation, personal growth, automated testing, code quality, pull requests, very, very kind of detailed, this is what success looks like.

That's awesome. And if you go through that effort and you put the thought and behind that process, I think one thing happens is, people who don't align with that self-select out, which is not a bad thing. Like maybe they're great in some other organization. And then people who really do align with it appreciate it and it helps retain them longer. And then it also acts, like I said, as a beacon to kind of bring people to you. Yeah, I love that. So I think that's a big, big part of it is just knowing and making it clear what success looks like. And we put all these things in our job description.

Do you really? Literally lay it out in detail. Here's everything we're looking for, right? You know I'm big on job descriptions. I think job descriptions are the first indicator of your company culture. And I don't think people realize that. So props to you for putting all that in there. wanted to obviously get, you know, get to some people say, hey, we've had a bunch of people tune in since we've been running our mouths. Let's see here, Nicole, it's great to see you. Erica, it's always great to see you. Kenneth, another another individual from Kenya this morning. I love it. Chris, what's going on? Alyssa, love the value of compassionate candor.

I love that so much. Kristina, is it for Ite? Yeah, you're not kid and girl. I'm dragging today. What else? Yolanda, good morning. Christina comes in, their definition of success is different and that's okay. Going back to obviously expectation and studying and I love it. I love what we talked about. For those of you who are tuning in, Chris just kind of went through his pillars, I would call it, his values within his organization. That was teed up because I asked the question is how do you build good culture with an engineering department where you have a lot of me attitudes, right? And I love what Chris said.

I think it self selects out, which is incredibly important. Chris, I know it's already March, right? So what are you all doing about reviews? How do you guys conduct reviews, right? Because we're talking about not being blindsided as an employee. That's something that I really try to make sure people do not feel. How do you all approach kind of reviews in one on ones in your organization? Yeah. So that has to be a weekly thing, in my opinion. I love it. You can't wait until the end of a quarter or the end of a year or anything like that. And it needs to be an ongoing dialogue.

People, people won, I think, really appreciate knowing when they're doing something well and when they're on track and doing something right. Equally, I have found most people are fairly reasonable about wanting to know the areas where perhaps they're not doing as well and how they can improve on that. I think one of the things that is really, really difficult is when you go into these review sessions at the end of a quarter and it's like, it's all kind of opinion based and there's no real, like, there's no real examples or anything to kind of guide you on it. And I think this ties right back into success.

Like we literally talk about the 11 things I was talking about in our weekly one on ones. How are we doing team engagement? How are we doing with our planning and estimation? And because we've kind of defined these out, it's really easy to kind of have conversations of, you know, these are areas where perhaps you're not the strongest right now. How can I help you grow there? And if they're doing an excellent job of issue management, then the issues are coming up on a weekly basis. And so, you know, I try to give every direct report that I have at least an hour a week of like time for one-on-ones.

And then each quarter we dive deeper and we really, really unpack it We spend about an hour and a half to two hours in a quarterly review session where we go a lot deeper. We talk, we don't just look at the things that are definitions of success in the role. We talk about values and revisit. We perform a bi-directional, the analyzer, each order, which is kind of a notion of like, re-evaluating is this right for us still. And a people analyzer is a tool We're kind of from the EOS system of kind of running companies. And it's a tool for kind of asking three questions and kind of asking, how are we aligning with our values?

Those three questions are, do you get the job that you have? Do you understand the responsibilities which you're supposed to be doing in it? Do you want it? Because people's wants change, right? What they want to do changes over time. And if the answer to that question is no, that's not a bad thing. Maybe there's maybe there's just a different change and that sparks a conversation about how we grow where you're at right now in some other position. And then do they have the capacity to do it? Capacity defined by the skill set, the time, the ability, the emotional capacity, the mental capacity, is this a job that they can succeed at?

And so we do that in our quarterly reviews. And then we kind of dive into, where do you wanna grow? Yeah. Where do you wanna go with your career? How can I help you get there? I think weekly conversations are a must though. I love that. I'm gonna post too. For those of you who watch, I'm posting Chris's, he sent me on our private chat, his job description for his senior engineer. I'm posting that publicly so y'all can check out. Actually, I can only post a YouTube that stinks. I will post after this on LinkedIn. so you guys can check it out about the pillars.

So Chris, I wanna pivot for our last half of the show, because I knew this would fly by. I wanna pivot to, well, first off, I want to talk about content creation a little bit, right? So Chris and I've had some conversations over the last few months about it, why to get into it. And I've admired Chris kind of getting after it. I think his content looks good. I would highly recommend to anybody who is watching go follow Chris on LinkedIn, because his content is very good, it's very engaging. Chris, talk about your thought process to get into it and why you think leaders within organizations should almost put out their own content now more than ever.

Yeah, I think it's, I've seen an acceleration of people feeling, feeling that desire and draw to put out content. And I absolutely was, and in that camp, I have a lot to say. I've been doing this a really long time and I think some of the things that I have to say could probably help some people and I will probably learn some things by engaging with people along the way. In my role, I need to build a team, an engineering team, a highly functional engineering team. This is probably the hottest job market for engineers in the last 30 years. How do you stand out as somebody who is looking to bring people into your organization?

That is a challenge I think a lot of companies are dealing with right now. And I started making content for several reasons. That was one of them is like I want people to become more familiar with me and learn some of the things that I talk about. I hope that the values I talked about, the things that we kind of are looking for, or come through in the content that I'm creating and people that are aligned with those values or kind of drawn to that content. I look at it as kind of a long-term game. I'm not putting out the content right now. It's a higher people right now.

I'm really doing it to build network, to increase that, reach, and then eventually over time, I do think that it'll assist in building out a team. And I think that'll be really, really important, a year from now. Yeah. You have from now. After Kermit, for example, has kind of gone through Series A, and we need to hire 20 engineers. And it's like, all right, well, what are the heck are we getting at 20 engineers for it, right? Like me. That's not in the conversation. But yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. I also think too, and I give props to Chris. I've had another guest on the show, Kyle Welch.

He's an engineering manager at Eventbrite here in Nashville. I would say really you and Kyle are only the two managers that actually are, that I know rather that like are actively doing recruiting efforts. So what Kyle did, Kyle wasn't putting out content. What Kyle was doing is he had to staff up his team and event, right? So obviously big, big organization. They, while they do have internal recruiters at the end of the day, you can't have your own recruiter for your team. Right? So Kyle knew this. Kyle opened up like sessions on to like where people could join. He said he was having these like, these classroom sessions of like 100, 200 people that were trying to learn more about the roles at Eventbrite, right?

And I just think hiring managers, like we talk about the job seeker always networking, right? We talked about the job seeker, which we're gonna get to in a second, about posting online and networking and going to meetups. hiring managers have to do it too. Like honestly, I would argue hiring managers may need to do it more right now than actual job seekers. If you're a job seeker, you can kind of just like, open it up on LinkedIn and people are going to call you hiring managers not so much thoughts. Yeah, I think that what you're talking about is what I see is probably the largest dysfunction and hiring process right now.

And that is that too many organizations think that like trying to bring talent into your organization is the job of HR. And it's not. If you're looking at your hiring process and you think that, you know, let me make a job description that's a copy of a job description from five years ago that I didn't put five minutes into and pass it off to my HR team who's going to treat it like a sales funnel and filter down the candidates that are going to land on my actual interview process. You're probably the ones that are complaining about finding people for your company. If you're not getting- I am cutting that sound clip and I am blasting that.

If you're not getting, you're gonna rolling up your sleeves and getting out there and talking with people and like advocating directly for your team, then what are you doing? So true, so true. I love that. And I wanna, so, so I wanna pivot a little bit now to the job seeker a little bit. And I'm interested in this too, because so this is how that I've been fascinated with, right? I think we're all defensive in nature. I think we as human beings don't like to be called out. I mean, just to be open on us, like I struggle with it. I'm in counseling just to try to not be so defensive and quick off the trigger if somebody says something to me.

Um, and what I've, what I've been interested in is interviewing developers is, I mean, essentially like their developers have to have their code criticized, critiqued, and sometimes in front of a lot of people. So what's your biggest advice, Chris? Like this LinkedIn user learning how to accept constructive criticism, working on projects in my weakness, LinkedIn user, you're not alone. This is everybody, right? You, you are not alone when you say this. Chris, what's some good tips for developers either early in their career or hell, just even senior in their career that they could be like, you know what, like that they can accept criticism. Like do you have any like tips at all?

Yeah, I think, yeah, I'm going to sound a little bit like a repeated record here. I think it starts with the values of the company, right? It really does. I've been on so many, what I would say, engineering teams that maybe had elements of a toxic nature to them. And to the point where like quite literally, I was afraid to like put up a pull request, for example, because I was afraid of just getting just tarnished or trashed on that pull request from a feedback perspective. And it's almost like the pull request or code review process was like this giant like chest pounding like ego, right?

Like, and it was, it was terrifying, right? And I think that one of the things that we've tried to do is absolutely normalize the code review process from the very beginning. Everybody does it. Like one of the first things we do when people come in to Kerman is we pair them up with another engineer and that's their buddy. And then, you know, the other thing we do is we ask them to do code reviews for all pull requests for like the first 30 days that go through. Like they're just getting eyes on code and like engaging in the conversation and just normalizing that everybody does it.

And like we're doing it out of the sake of helping and it's not a send and forget, which I think is one of the biggest issues with some of the code review stuff is that, you know, a lot of times people will write their piece on their opinion and it's like this drastic change is gonna take the person probably like half a day or a day to rewrite. And it's like, it's very easy to like launch that this is what you need to do when you don't have to go and do it, right? So there's an aspect built into our defining success and our values of like, if you're going to render a critical piece on that, you're going to engage in assisting that engineer in like getting that done.

It's not a send and forget you are now invested. And it's an expectation that one, you're doing it and two, you're investing and helping them get it there. And so in that way, it has kind of reduced the toxicity that can that can like grow from kind of critical code review processes. Yeah. Because the people who are doing the actual reviewing are now invested in assisting and getting in across the finish line. Well, we can go in right there because that was beautifully said. That's awesome. I love it. I love it. And Dominic, it's great to see you. And then yeah, Kristian, normalized the code review process.

I love that so much. So, Chris, what are some other tips for job seekers right now? Right. I mean, obviously the market's crazy. As somebody in leadership like yourself. I mean, you kind of see, you see, you see it all, right? You see the people who are struggling, who are flailing to obviously the very groomed interviewers. How, what are just some general tips where people can level up their interviewing skills right now? Yeah. I think that it's about the story. You got to craft a narrative that, that it is a story, it's storytelling more than anything. And everything that you do with it is storytelling.

If you can write your story down, treat it like you are literally writing a story. Make an outline that talks about your journey. Not as this is the job that I did and the things that I did, but rather the path that I took and how the things in my career shaped who I am today. Tell that story. It tells a thousand times in front of the mirror to the point where you've got that story so down that you've created versions of the story depending on who you're talking to. and like let that let that story go and like you're gonna be tired of hearing it but everybody else is gonna hear it for the first time and I think wow this person like really like is invested in themselves yeah that's it in their growth this is how this thing led to this thing led to this thing and when you can do that it really like you know polishes it and and the other thing I say on that is like have different versions of it have your 30 second version have your five minute version, have your 10 minute version.

If you have the length of your interview or whatever it may be, choose one that takes up, you know, roughly, you know, maybe 10% of the time of the interview. Now kick things off and get you get you started on a good foot. It'll build your confidence while you're talking. And then the other thing I'll say is if you can early start asking questions, don't wait till the end, try to take over the interview a little bit and direct the the the If you can get them talking, then your job is easy at that point. You get them talking. People love talking about themselves. And so like you get them talking by asking good questions, not just any questions.

Ask about the company. Ask about why they're looking for this role. What does the success look like? And if they don't have a good answer for what success looks like, that's probably a red flag. But if you can get them talking, the interview overall, their impressions will be much better. Yeah, I mean, it's so it's crazy again. I did not pay Chris to say that but I literally I literally posted and then and then Nicole Nicole just Just affirmed which I love but I literally said people should like It was over the holidays because I said like hey holidays are slow take this time to actually write your story I literally said write or journal because I think what's going on is the biggest thing the biggest thing I see again, I interview folks like Chris every day, every day.

I hear the same thing. People don't know how to talk about themselves. And it is the craziest thing. Now, I will tell you this, as a society, we look down, right? Upon people, if they just talk about themselves, right? So, so it's definitely a different kind of mindset you have to get into. But like, and I love this and I knew that would resonate with Christina. Cause Christine is really big on personal brand and store branding. But, you know, for me as a job seeker, like if you can come in and tell me, Hey, This is where I've been. This is where I want to go and here's what I've done in between I mean then it becomes a conversation right a lot of y'all are sitting here thinking man interview suck Yeah, because you don't really say anything you just sit there and then all Chris knows what to do just grill you because you're not having a conversation Yeah, you're not having a conversation.

So I love that time also to Chris. I miss you. I see your thoughts Are you you don't tweet a lot right? You you're just on LinkedIn. I would recommend tweeting and if you're a job And here's why my communication has gotten so much better Because if you can communicate in 140 to 280 characters at one time you start to realize how much like fluff words you use So that's just another tip to job seekers. I didn't know if you had any thoughts on that Yeah, I just recently started doing a little more tweeting some of the stuff that I'm doing on LinkedIn I'm copying over and and you know re-amplifying Yep Now I agree.

Yep So as we wrap up here and our news would happen, we got five minutes left. Chris, I always leave this time for individuals. If there's any topics we didn't cover, anything that popped into your head that you want to discuss, any words of wisdom you want to leave the individuals with, just anything. So you got five minutes, just spit some truth. Take us to church, Chris, take us to church. All right, here it is. I think that when you're looking for a job, like ask questions around how you work. I have in my career seen this same exact. How the company works. How the company works.

What does a typical day look like? What does your software development life cycle look like? What does that process look like? I feel like there's a lot of companies out there who are just sold on the idea that Scrum Agile is the only way to do it. And it's like, to the point where it's like they're dogmatic about process. And, you know, and one of the things that I found in years and years and years of doing this on teams is that there's something about the way a lot of companies implement Scrum Agile that creates a toxic engineering culture and then something to look out for.

If you're an engineer and you find yourself staying at a job for two to three years and then after two to three years, it's like, man, this sucks. And it all started out great because they're doing Scrum Agile And the, you know, after a couple of years, it feels more like they're pushing velocity. Developers are starting to sandbag the work that they're doing on their estimations and their story points. And you just feel like you're coming to a crawl and a slug, a slug and all that sort of stuff then like it's usually how it's implemented. I'm not saying agile is bad. I'm not saying scrum is bad.

I say you have people come at you. What I'm saying is that, because I absolutely think they're great, I'm saying the way a lot of organizations implement it, it leads to toxic engineering culture. Here's the things to look for that can avoid it. How early in the process do engineers get involved? That's really the question to be looking for and to be asked. Do they need to be involved early? Early early early, yes. So many times you get companies that essentially kind of decide what's going to be worked on, They go into this giant context transfer session called Sprint Planning, where you spend four hours, six hours diving into what are we working on this week.

And so many times, that's the first time the engineers have ever seen that work. And then what happens is they start feeling like cogs in a wheel. They start feeling like why are we working on this and questioning it because they don't have any empathy to the why. They're not involved in any of the problem solving. And the end result is that it creates more engineering burnout. And so if you find an organization that runs an agile scrum process or whatnot, and they're bringing engineers in before sprint planning early in the project planning process, that's the one to look for because they're going to have a much higher chance of becoming a less toxic engineering organization.

I've never heard that. That's fantastic. So that's my soapbox for five minutes. I love that. fantastic. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out Chris stale real quick when we end it. But y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us this morning on guidance counselor 2.0 on Tuesday. So go connect with Chris. I will also post Chris's job description for curment. So you can check out other hiring managers. You can check out how he writes job descriptions includes his values and pillars in it. Again, want to give a shout out to my folks at Render ATL. Go check them out. It's going to be a blast.

I will be there all you can eat food and adult beverages. It's never a bad thing in the tech office. So again, thank y'all for hanging out with us. Go care with Chris. Chris, thank you for coming on, buddy. It was great hanging. And y'all have a great Tuesday and I'll see you all tomorrow. Not 30M Central. Y'all take it easy. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. Because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes, and I myself rarely finish an entire episode, so I appreciate you so, so much for listening.

Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others, and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like, right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it. So, thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T.S. and on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.