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Ask HN: Role-model companies with the best dev culture in 2023

72 pointsby fandorinover 2 years ago
What are the role-model software companies with amazing dev culture now?<p>In 2013-15 many people were looking up to how Netflix or Spotify built their dev culture and how they operated and developed their products.<p>What companies are setting current trends now (in 2022-23)?<p>EDIT: I know that &#x27;amazing culture&#x27; can mean different things to different people. I&#x27;m interested in examples of the companies that are setting the current trends how development should be done. Structure of teams, CI&#x2F;CD, pipelines, responsibilities, tooling, day-to-day working methodology (product management probably too).<p>Of course this judgement is subjective - I&#x27;m fine with that.

17 comments

half0wlover 2 years ago
Generally, I think having an open handbook is the trending culture. Building in the open is becoming more popular - GitLab really moved the needle on this, so IMO from an outsider&#x27;s perspective, Airbyte [0] and Posthog [1] has the best (publicly available &amp; documented) processes, apart from GitLab of course (I didn&#x27;t like that they removed stuff like their compensation calc, but I understand the motivation).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;handbook.airbyte.com&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;handbook.airbyte.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;posthog.com&#x2F;handbook">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;posthog.com&#x2F;handbook</a><p>edit: addendums
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mattkantorover 2 years ago
Shameless plug - the place I&#x27;ve been at for the last 2 years has the best culture I&#x27;ve seen or heard of (I&#x27;ve been around since the 90s). It is so good I changed my plans and went from contract to Full time a year ago. Transparency, pragmatism, solutions over blame, remote first, learning focused, rational hours (4.5 day work week), approachable C level, solid feedback process up and down. CEOs drive this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flywheelsoftware.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;why-flywheel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flywheelsoftware.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;why-flywheel</a>
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meowtasticover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ve noticed a common theme across several such posts&#x2F;comments - our definitions of a &quot;good&quot; company can widely differ. I, for one, find it&#x27;s important that the team can always quantify how every feature adds value to customers. Others are happy just focusing on highly-technical, challenging work.<p>We&#x27;re already starting to see examples of these differences in the thread started by @JonChesterfield; I&#x27;m sure others will pop up.<p>The only conclusion I can draw so far is that interviewing the employer remains as important as ever. Don&#x27;t just write off a company because of what you see online, just have a 30 minute chat.
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yashapover 2 years ago
The startup I work at is definitely Netflix culture inspired, I think they remain a pretty popular “culture role model.”<p>Wasn’t sure if it’d be for me at first, as it’s so different from where I was before. Previous company I was at, great social culture (pre-COVID), very nice people, but very top down decision making. Also nobody ever got let go (or even really talked to) for performance reasons, very easy place to coast. Some people referred to the culture as “toxic positivity”, which is a pretty good description. Really, the only way people got let go was at mass layoffs every 2 years or so, but between layoff people could dog it and nobody would say anything. Overall it was socially fun, but work wise extremely slow, inefficient and bureaucratic. I have lots of good memories from that place, but I don’t think it was an EFFECTIVE company culture.<p>At my current, “Netflix inspired culture” company, there’s a lot less process, a lot more personal responsibility, and an expectation of high performance. People who aren’t contributing enough are quickly told, and if they can’t turn it around, let go. I thought it might feel too harsh&#x2F;cold for me, but I actually really like the culture. Low process, high productivity, and you can trust basically all your teammates to be high quality contributors and decision makers. I feel more pride in my team and what we’re building. Social aspects are definitely not as fun as at my last co., but I do think a fair bit of that is the post-COVID world, hard to have a really social&#x2F;fun company culture when most people are remote most of the time.
lumostover 2 years ago
My 2 cents,<p>10 years ago there was a huge focus on structuring engineering teams in ways that made it so that individual engineers did not matter. There were also tons of dependencies between teams as you would have &quot;Systems Engineers&quot;, &quot;Devops Engineers&quot;, &quot;DBAs&quot;, &quot;Data Scientists&quot; etc. etc.<p>Web work was also relatively new, and few leaders actually had a handle on how much time things would take. Functional splits lead to teams making poor assumptions on other team&#x27;s efforts, and agile produced cancerously bad software cultures.<p>My experience in 2023 is that few teams maintain any agile concepts outside of daily stand-ups&#x2F;weekly syncs. Teams are generally functionally integrated, and have a more or less date oriented culture depending on how annual goals are set and how you make commitments to customers. Cloud computing, improved test infrastructure&#x2F;expectations, CI&#x2F;CD, and maturity have dramatically changed development culture industry wide.<p>Is this an a-typical experience? I can&#x27;t think of the last time I saw a project with a date that the engineer hadn&#x27;t set.
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jemmywover 2 years ago
I like the place I work, it&#x27;s pragmatic, doesn&#x27;t jump on every bandwagon, ships features to customers (I&#x27;ve worked places that just couldn&#x27;t get things shipped), has interesting problems, blameless culture, 100% remote. Still a good size for me, not too big, not tiny. Great CTO who is very intelligent, kind, yet firm when he disagrees.<p>I doubt we&#x27;re setting trends. It&#x27;s just a lovely place to work. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aha.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aha.io&#x2F;</a>
didipover 2 years ago
No such thing as a company with the best work culture. It is very dependent on the team and the manager.<p>And even if you found an amazing team, all it takes is one re-org for the team to be ruined.
mlhpdxover 2 years ago
Unfortunately the answer is a lot of companies. Not big names, not ones that extol their own virtues, not the loudest voices. So, yeah, difficult to find but numerous.<p>Generally I’ve found them to be smallish companies with a track record of growth (“uninterrupted prosperity”) and a culture that values the holistic good (i.e. has buried the exclusive focus on shareholders) and comes from the top.
JonChesterfieldover 2 years ago
Also welcome, what companies have broadly adequate dev culture?<p>Something like:<p>- you don&#x27;t get paged when things break<p>- it&#x27;s possible to ship to production within, say, a month<p>- there&#x27;s a sane CI system in place<p>- there&#x27;s no product owner between you and the customer<p>- at least partially remote working is OK<p>(@op perhaps you could clarify what would qualify as amazing culture? I suspect the bar is higher than the above)
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isuckatcodingover 2 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.keyvalues.com&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.keyvalues.com&#x2F;</a>
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notsure357over 2 years ago
GitLab is my favorite company to watch, really hope they someday become more popular than GitHub
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ushakovover 2 years ago
Vercel, Fly.io, Automattic, GitHub, HashiCorp
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kirsoover 2 years ago
Some of these companies can also be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peoplefirstjobs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peoplefirstjobs.com</a><p>It doesn&#x27;t seem to be updated very often though with resources so I am collecting a static list of such companies in case anyone is interested to explore. Obviously it won&#x27;t fit across the bill but some of the criteria:<p>- Product-led<p>- Known for excellent engineering culture<p>- Outcome oriented<p>- Remote<p>- Invest in professional development<p>- Neither chaotic or beauracratic<p>- Sustainable &amp; profitable
tompic823over 2 years ago
At Doppler we have a strong culture of engineering excellence, thorough PR review, security, automation&#x2F;CI, and helping each other succeed. We give engineers 30% time to work on things they think are important and are remote first (but also have an office in SF). Our engineering team hangs out in Discord all day to make pair programming&#x2F;debugging easy. It helps that our CEO used to be an engineer.
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brundolfover 2 years ago
I don&#x27;t have firsthand knowledge, but based on their product I get the feeling Discord must have an amazing dev culture
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gardenhedgeover 2 years ago
I don&#x27;t have the link right now but apparently Spotify didn&#x27;t follow their own squad stuff that they put out into the industry.
hassanamirkhanover 2 years ago
Airbyte
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