Cultivating Friendgineers
tl;dr
- our engineers are too humble
- I yell about how great they are
- everyone wins
what is the retro lovefest
Every other friday, someone sends out a glowing email all about the things we accomplished that sprint. (Sometimes it is literally glowing.) Big feature releases are part of it, but it’s mostly people saying nice things about how much we enjoy working together. Here’s what an average email looks like.
how it started
At LendingHome, we work in two week sprints, culminating in a meeting called “the retro” where we talk about how things went. It’s my favorite meeting. Everyone brings something to talk about and at the end, we have a list of “action items” to make the next sprint better.
One day, a few months after I joined, I was “in charge” of the retro. I went down the list of topics people had written down and added action items for the important ones. Sometimes I told people to move it along when they got wordy.
For that particular sprint, there were a bunch of items like “April is amazing and I love working with her” and “Alex made some awesome optimizations to our credit-policy workers” and “Renga says really smart things I’m glad he joined”. At the end, I had written “Tell X that they’re awesome” for six or seven people.
I didn’t know what to do for them, so I wrote an email just before I left for the weekend saying how great they were. I sent it to the engineering team and figured I was finished.
Slightly more than two weeks later, I’m in a meeting with our CTO, and he brings up the email and how last Friday, he hoped that there would be another one. At that moment, I realized that I had started something.
Shit. I can’t run retro every time, what am I gonna do.
It turns out that when you work with helpful people, it’s easy to crowdsource your job. We created an online sticky board and every other Friday, I tell people to add the cool stuff they did that sprint. Then I copy-paste it into an email, add some emoji and caps lock and press send. It takes barely any time, and it makes us look great.
Lately, we’ve been playing with a voting bot in slack that keeps track of scores for everybody. Burrito emoji won the first week so I haven’t been taking it seriously, but sometimes it works. Greg won last sprint because he organized a talk with one of the React founders and that’s pretty awesome.
why you should do it
Low Effort, High Impact
If it takes you more than 30 minutes, congrats, you’re like me and you rewrite everything five times. But for the rest of you, it’s fast and easy.
FUN
But we don’t have any fun we’re serious engineers you say. Well ok. Don’t have fun. Send out a serious email, call it “BORING SPRINT RETROSPECTIVE” and make sure the font is set to something like Times New Roman. You can get the rest of the benefits without any fun.
Your Boss will like it
Your boss is probably exhausted, and they’re in meetings all the time, and they never smile. Silly emails are a great way to remind them that you appreciate the heck out of what they do.
Your Coworkers will Like It
This one is much more important. Your coworkers are great people who work hard and build cool things! Make them feel loved and appreciated without being a weirdo. Or, be a weirdo with plants all over your desk and send out ridiculous emails talking about how much you love your coworkers. For some reason, they will find it charming.
You will Like It
I look forward to Fridays for A LOT of reasons, but retro is way up near the top of the list! I smile a lot writing the email, because it’s great to read about everything we accomplished. It’s especially great when it’s about something that you didn’t have to put the long hours in on. The guys that sit next to me just released the thing they’ve been working on for the last six months and I am going to hype the shit out of it.
in conclusion
Weekly, or semi-weekly, or bi-weekly, or however you organize chunks of work, in whatever way feels best, let people know that you think they’re the bees knees. They’ll be happy to know that they’re appreciated, and you’ll have made someone’s day. Go spread the love!
Feel like being the subject of a glowing email written by yours truly? We’re hiring engineers in our San Francisco and Columbus, OH offices. See our careers page to learn more. We can’t wait to hear from you!
