Level-up Engineering Engineering Culture: Sally Lait (Senior Engineering Manager at Monzo)
Interview with Sally Lait, Senior Engineering Manager at Monzo. Their engineering culture is well-known in the industry for being one of the best. In this podcast you'll learn how to improve your engineering culture and what red flags to look for.
In this interview we're covering:
- Key elements of a great engineering culture
- Monzo's engineering culture
- Cultural on-boarding
- Engineering culture metrics
- Building your engineering culture
- Signs of a weak engineering culture
- Dangerous behaviors
- Improving your engineering culture
- Implementing changes to your culture
- Scaling your engineering culture
Excerpt from the interview:
"My favourite thing in the culture here is that defaulting to transparency is a key value for us. It doesn’t mean everything is transparent, but we keep as much in the open as possible. This includes engineering proposals as well.
When somebody is looking to make a change to the architecture or to the culture, they write a proposal, and anybody in the company is free to comment and to share their views. This way, everyone can see what's going on. Everything goes through Slack, so everything is visible.
Slack is an important tool from a cultural point of view as well. One of our senior engineers built the Guys bot, which pings up on Slack if anybody uses the word “guys.” It’s not an inclusive phrase.
We've built these things into our wider culture by using our engineering skills to create tools. I love how these gently nudge people to live out the key company values."