Eiso: Hey everyone. This is Eiso and Jason, we're back again to talk about engineering leadership and all the interesting questions that stem from it. Before we kick it off and start talking about topics. How have the last couple of weeks been for you Jason?

Jason: Pretty good up here in Canada. As I mentioned to you in the pre-show, we got our first dose of the vaccine, so, you know, it feels good to see the light at the end of the tunnel in some ways. We also got a puppy. So we've been dealing with that, which is a lot like having a kid in some ways they get you up at night. I feel like I have another kid in the house that just eats a lot. A lot, a lot.

Eiso: I know the feeling. We have two golden retrievers here that were spaced a year apart. So I went through the puppy experience twice now having gone through the kid experience, but I guess it equally involves a lot of poop.

Jason: Yes it does.

Eiso: So maybe that's not a bad lead into the conversation starting point of today, which is "Culture: Marrying what we do and how we do it", as you so eloquently said on our last podcast.

I'd love to just start a little bit about asking you, what isn't company culture?

Jason: I don't think company culture is what has been predominantly defined by a lot of what actually gets in the common Zeitgeist attributed to culture for Silicon valley, which is the way the building looks or the furniture or those things. I think that that's kind of window dressing on a lot of the different things that go on in Silicon Valley, you know, talk about all of those things and yeah, maybe that should go into the culture bucket, but it would be the final five or 10%. But I also think that traditionally it's the easiest thing to point out and talk about, so it gets a lot of notoriety. But no one talks about your decision-making processes. No one talks about what happens when the site is down. No one talks about, you know, what's going to happen when a customer churns, how the entire company is gonna react. I mean, that's culture right there, those sorts of things.

Eiso: I had a co-founder at a previous company and he used to say "culture is what distinctly differentiates you from everybody else. And it's what makes you want to stay at a company.  And particularly, it also says who shouldn't join."  And so, talking about engineering cultures in different engineering organizations, do you have some kind of a bucketing or framework in the back of your mind from all the companies that you've seen, that you would kind of classify to different cultures?

Jason: I don't know if I have a framework, it would be loosely defined if I did. But given that your former co-founder uses a quote, I'll use one too, there's one from Maya Angelou, which I talk about generally speaking for leadership.  Everyone probably knows exactly which one I'm talking about, which is: "people will forget what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel." And when you think about culture and you think about engineering or you think about anything, generally speaking, that's what you're actually referring to.

So, I look at  engineering product and company building similarly, which is one of the main differentiators, I think, for culture and how I would start to bucket them is maybe on the more conservative end of the spectrum or assertive end of the spectrum. And by that, what I'm actually talking about is speed. And it tends to be what you can do, how fast you do it, but then how safe you are at doing those things, because you can be incredibly fast and reckless. Or you can be incredibly conservative and safe, or you can be incredibly conservative and reckless too.

I think that, when I look at different engineering cultures, the first thing I actually look at is how many times a day are they releasing software? What are the processes for that? How do people think about bringing something to market? Do they need to analyze it and write 15 page PRDs and get 15 levels of sign off? Or can they experiment? You know, and again, spectrums, nothing is black and white, nothing is binary. You're looking at different percentages of varying degrees of any of those things. And I'm kind of looking at that, probably, to start.