How is the culture of the engineering team at Inventa?
Starting at a new company always brings some level of anxiety. We want to understand the processes, technologies, and challenges, but above all, get to know people and feel part of the company’s team and culture. This happens because we human beings are creatures that live in groups. By living in groups that our race thrived on planet Earth and looking back to the beginnings, not being part of a group meant that you would likely die from various dangers such as animals, sudden climate changes, and scarcity of food and water. Even today, with all the evolution of human society, wanting to live and be accepted by the group is still part of our survival instinct. However, our society is much more complex and diverse than it was thousands of years ago. We have different tribes with different styles and tastes and each one attracts people who identify more with those standards. This is no different for the work environment. Companies are made up of people and it is these people who will dictate what culture the company will adopt, what social standards are accepted, and what kind of people it wants to attract because of these standards. It is the leader’s responsibility to set these standards! At Inventa, we are very proactive about the culture we want to create and the people we want to attract to work with us.
Here are some topics that we think are extremely important and that we have been actively working to build and develop in the company.
Actively seek and share knowledge
Proactively share knowledge, document, make presentations, and recommend literature. Be an ambassador of this principle. At the same time, we must as a team not only actively share knowledge but actively seek knowledge. If you don’t know something, search, ask, and understand! Continuously developing and helping others to develop along with you is an attitude we highly value! This type of attitude practiced over time and collectively, has an incalculable positive effect on people and in the company.
We care about our customers, create a product we like and value
It is very common to find technology professionals who do not want to understand the product or the pain of customers. They are task executors, they want someone to detail exactly what they need to do and they execute what was asked without question, without thinking if it makes sense, and without even having an opinion about it. Honestly, from my point of view, I can’t find fun working in this way.
We spend more time of our lives working than doing anything else. This time needs to be pleasant, we need to feel useful, to see that we are improving the lives of our customers directly or indirectly. For example, at Inventa we’re building a product to help millions of small to medium entrepreneurs to succeed! People who have stores in their neighborhoods resell products and be responsible for their family income. It’s way more pleasing and fun to use the knowledge to impact these people.
We care about what we are doing and not just doing it because someone asked us to. An engineering team that understands the why of things, brings its opinion, connects with the product, wants to understand the impact of its work, and is part of defining the solution. This is the status quo of the Inventa engineering team.
Technical excellence
Building something of quality, the right way, and that can scale shouldn’t be an option for a technology company. Unfortunately, for many companies, quality is secondary, and to justify the number of bugs and bad decisions some people misrepresent the concept of MVP.
I would like to emphasize that no MVP literature does connote doing something of low quality with lots of bugs and bad maintenance. To try to make my point of view clearer, I will make a parallel with civil construction to make more evident the bad decision-making that exists in the world of technology.
Imagine that you are constructing a building. You set the scope, cost, delivery time, and quality standards for people who bought an apartment in it. For several reasons, you will be late and then you need to make a decision to try to meet the deadline:
- Build as defined, but removing various quality standards which could result in the building falling down after a few months
- Drastically reducing the finishing phase, the apartments will not be as beautiful and comfortable as expected, however, it is something incremental that you can negotiate this later improvement
Of course, none of the options is what was sold and expected, but we know that given the options there is only one viable, right?
If in the physical world option 1 is off-trade, why in software development is it usually an option and often the chosen option?
Well, I believe we need to be creative, do it right and apply the Pareto principle in our day-to-day decisions and prioritizations to really deliver something of value with the least amount of effort, however never build a house of cards. Knowledge in computing fundamentals, using best software development practices and building scalable, resilient, and easy-to-maintain solutions without overengineering are the day-to-day of Inventa’s engineering team.
Titleless and TeamWork
It is utopian to say that I or anyone else has no ego at all. Let’s face it, we all have some level of ego. However, it is the responsibility of leadership to encourage every day that everyone puts their egos aside and works as a team creating bridges and not walls. We need to be role models in our day-to-day conversations, in joint decision-making, and in respecting and empathizing with everyone, no matter their position or level. To further help us act in this direction, a practice we adopted at Inventa was to remove people’s titles.
All levels of leaders are only ‘Engineering Leads’, and all levels of engineers are only ‘engineers’ in their specialties: Software Engineers (SWE), Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), or Software Development Engineers in Test (SDET).
Huh, but doesn’t leadership have titles like Senior Manager, Head, VP, CTO, etc? Don’t engineers have titles like Senior, Staff, Principle, or Distinguished?
Yeah… it’s really cool to have a title like that, but what does it add at the end of the day? Creating titles at Inventa’s current moment doesn’t bring any value to us, it will only feed the more senior people’s egos and possibly remove the psychological safety of the more junior engineers. We have processes called RFCs and Engineering Design Reviews in the company that we run to make decisions as a group. We don’t have and don’t intend to have a team of architects who don’t put their hands on the code and dictate what needs to be done and how. We work with an inner source culture that encourages everyone to be responsible for the evolution of our platform, everyone can propose improvements regardless of their level and with a clear and repeatable decision-making process, we are able to evolve our platform consistently and repeatedly.
That said, not having titles goes a long way in conveying that everyone can lead or participate in conversations about architecture and solutions by focusing on facts and fundamentals rather than who is the most senior person in the discussion. We encourage that regardless of your level, you will never know everything, putting down your shields and wanting to learn from others, even from people younger than you, is an attitude that we value and cultivate at Inventa!
People leadership and technical leadership are not exclusive functions
A chef is also a cook, a director of a hospital is also a doctor, and the owner of a law firm is also a lawyer. For you to lead a technical area, regardless of what it is, you need to technically master the concepts and have already applied them in practice for a few years to be a good leader.
The engineering lead at Inventa follows the same principle, our engineering leads are also SWEs/SREs/SDETs, you can’t rate and help to grow an engineer if you don’t understand what he/she does exactly. An engineering lead is responsible for managing the team, leading people, and ensuring technical excellence in deliveries. But of course, always giving autonomy and sharing technical responsibility with the team.
Career ladder and Y career
There are people who really want to go into leadership and others who go that way because they think there is no other way to develop and grow in their careers. When this happens, we usually lose good engineers and gain mediocre leaders.
That’s why we created a Y-shaped career for the Inventa engineering team. You can continue to grow as an engineer or as a leader, knowing that regardless of the path you take, you will face challenges with compatible complexities and an identical compensation package for equal levels. Also, you can do a sideways move if you feel you’re on the “wrong” branch for what you’re looking for for your development. Having this in the company is ensuring that we are able to put the right people in the right places and extract the best from each one.
Proposals with our culture
I’m passionate about what I do and bringing together people who value the points discussed and who can enrich even more what we build and value is something that motivates me a lot and makes me sure that I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else in my life.
If you identify with our culture, believe that this is the right way to build a strong and cohesive engineering team, and want to help the lives of thousands of small entrepreneurs in Brazil and Latin America, you should come to talk to us! We’re just at the beginning and we’re going a long way with the right people on our boat.
If you want to know more about us, add me on LinkedIn or apply to one of our open positions! Let’s learn together and build something bigger and better than we could do individually!
