Building a Culture of Continuous Learning
At Etermax, we believe that the success of our business depends on our people and the value they bring to everything we do.
Our pillars in engineering are continuous improvement and technical excellence focused on continuously delivering valuable software.
We relentlessly strive for improvement, be it as individuals or as an organization as a whole.
We see employee development as a key factor in creating high performing teams. Although each person’s career belongs to themselves, in the engineering department we strongly believe in the importance of creating spaces and opportunities for career development. To reinforce this idea, we have developed a career plan in which we promote what we believe are the foundations and best practices for being great engineers. We did this to improve and guide not only technical skills, but also soft and product-related ones.
Technical and Product Development Practices
It has been a couple of years since we adopted Lean as our working philosophy for the production of games as well as the continuous improvement of our processes. One of its benefits is the idea of working in small batches and iterating by conducting experiments with techniques such as A/B testing in order to get feedback quickly and validate or invalidate– our assumptions. In addition to that, we believe that simplicity, one of the Extreme Programming values, is essential in software development. This does not mean that quality is abandoned. On the contrary, we attach great importance to quality and good practices of software development with a focus on maximizing software delivery by doing what is needed and no more in order to get feedback as soon as possible.
We have adopted many of the technical practices of Extreme Programming along with other well known good practices of software development fostered by the authors of the agile and the craftsmanship manifestos, among others.
At Etermax, it is commonplace to hear people talking about Clean Code, Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Infrastructure as code, Continuous Delivery and the like on a daily basis.
Cultural Practices
We got many benefits from practicing pair programming. Nowadays, it is very common to see teams practicing this technique every day. It boosts knowledge sharing and collaboration, it reduces bugs, develops interpersonal skills, produces better solutions (two brains are better than one) and, in some cases, it avoids having to go through a separate code review process that slows the delivery.
Another common practice we follow is the use of Katas, where we gather together to solve a programming challenge with the goal of learning or honing skills. In general, these sessions are driven by TDD doing pair programming and last around 2 hours.
We also encourage engineers to facilitate workshops and talks to spread knowledge.
Our Career Plan
To drive these practices and show that they are valued in our culture, we have developed a career plan (ladder) that gives support to them. It reflects the soft, technical and product skills that we value most. Each step of the ladder means a seniority level and has different requirements with regard to the aforementioned group of skills. By having a clear career path, every engineer knows what is expected from them and how to climb the ladder.
The career plan has been built along with a huge set of bibliography created and maintained by the engineering team. There, for instance, you can find links to different blog articles by Martin Fowler, a video from Uncle Bob’s Clean Code collection or a link to an article that discusses the different levels of delegation from Management 3.0, among others.
To that end, it is key that leadership and management be aligned in giving support to drive our engineers’ career growth. We attach great importance to goal-setting and mentoring by leadership so that engineers can improve and grow throughout their careers.
Summing Up
It’s been more than two years since we made this cultural change and we are very proud of the results we have got so far. That is why we wanted to share our experience with the community through this post. Our experience has allowed us to confirm that the result of emphasizing simplicity, technical quality, continuous delivery and continuous improvement are motivated teams, less rework and a much healthier culture.
If you feel identified with our culture, our beliefs and the way we work, we invite you to contact us. We would be delighted to know more about you.
In our next posts, we will be covering some of the mentioned aspects in much more detail.
