I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for making things just happen and work, not for firefighting.
A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement elements of whatever culture you're setting, or they'll bring a poor culture with them.
(My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)
> (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)
You just described my last job. It went from one of the most productive (and I mean we fucking SHIPPED - quality work, usually the first time around), engaging, and fun places I've ever worked to a place where a new VP would sit in every single group's sprint planing, retros, and standups and interject if we deviated one iota from a very orthodox scrum framework. The engineering turnover was pretty much 95% within a year, with only the most junior people remaining because they didn't really know better to move on. Work slowed, tech debt ballooned, but OMFG were the product managers happy because they were also allowed in every step of the way.
Work slowed to a crawl, too. Eventually a private equity firm swooped in and made things even worse...
That sounds like there was some top-down, or mid-down, culture changing (which can easily happen as a company tries to build a hierarchy, drawing from outside).
Another risk is bottom-up culture. You could have your existing leadership the same, but you start hiring ICs who bring their culture with them, and you fail to nurture the desired culture.
I think one of the concerns with early startups is if the early engineering leadership hasn't gotten respect and buy-in from the CEO, as the company grows. If the early engineering leadership was doing unusually solid work and culture, but the CEO thinks they are just random fungible commodities, and that now it's time for a different mode, then CEO will probably urinate away all that corporate strength very quickly.
The company was founded by an ideas guy (not technical) and the first hire was the (technical) CTO. The CTO set the initial excellent engineering culture. The way I saw it, the founder had no choice but to defer to the engineering team in the beginning because without them there was no future. However, once we started bringing in revenue, the pressure and interference from the CEO started to mount until the CTO essentially got tired of it and moved on. The CEO wasn't even a terrible person, but had trouble dealing with pushback (and I've chatted with him after and he admits he was wrong - he was also in his early 20s during all of this).
The CTO position was never replaced and, I'm not making this up, the head of product was made VP of engineering. An external director of engineering was brought in to implement business metrics, tracking, process etc that all answered to this VP of product. Any sense of balance was removed and the highest ranking advocates for tech were team leads. The VP of Eng wasn't necessarily evil, but couldn't or wouldn't do anything that got in the way of business and couldn't convey how important it was to sometimes take a step back.
We did alright financially, though. We had an exit (not enough for me to retire, but at 45 I essentially don't have to save for it anymore if that makes sense) and moved on, but the slowed down development meant that some other new ideas were only finally gaining traction when the PE firm gobbled us up. I personally think had things remained as they were, or changed (as companies do need to as they grow) more positively, we'd have been much more successful.
A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement elements of whatever culture you're setting, or they'll bring a poor culture with them.
(My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)