Engineering culture

It’s amazing how different engineering cultures can be from one company to the next. You’d think by now we’d have figured out a successful formula. All the top companies work really hard to define their unique culture and use it to attract talent. Autonomy! Collaboration! Urgency! Ownership!

As an industry I think we should agree on what kind of culture it takes to build a successful engineering organization, and standardize it. We can standardize protocols and hardware interfaces, so let’s do the same for culture. Get together, figure out what works, spec it out, and move on.

Once we define it we can study its effectiveness and try out variations. Of course we’d need to leave room for innovation. The standard could be versioned. Is anyone formally studying this? I’m sure ISO is onto this, or IEEE. I’ll research this idea a little more and report back. Stay tuned!