Coding without borders: setting up an international software team
For tech leaders, membership of the global village in the 2020s means navigating a brave new world of opportunity. New markets, broader horizons and a wider pool of talent are all good reasons to expand your engineering capabilities across national borders.
But as anyone familiar with the topic will tell you, these new possibilities bring with them new complexities.
How do you hire the right team to deliver the magic? How do you bridge differences of culture, language and expectations? And how do you make everyone feel like part of the same team, wherever they happen to be based?
In this post I want to share some of the ways we’re answering these questions as our business, MPB, sets up its first cross-functional squad engineering outside the UK.
And for us, it turns out that if you want the best senior tech hires to run your new operation, basic coding workshops are a very good place to start.
But first …
Why are we doing this?
MPB’s European HQ is in Berlin, Germany’s capital and premier tech hub. Our business buys, sells and trades used photo and video equipment, via an online platform, supported and fulfilled by our three circular commerce centres (CCCs) in the UK, USA and Germany.
We’re setting up two new product and engineering squads in Berlin to work alongside the current four in Brighton, England. While localisation of content and payment methods will of course form part of their work, the intention isn’t to run them as a completely separate unit.
Our purpose is simply to draw from a wider range of skilled people, developing a common codebase to underpin all our systems. Not having to rely on a single location also gives us a bit more resilience, while for our wider Berlin team it’s a chance to be more directly involved with solutions design due to our co-located Operations colleagues.
We’re almost finished recruiting our senior team, to be followed by a further round of engineering and product hires later in the year.
Every day’s a school day
Creating a new engineering team from scratch isn’t easy and we knew our first challenge would be attracting the right leaders. We were looking for people who could not only define their own priorities but also draw the best out of their soon-to-be colleagues.
Here we faced a challenge. MPB is well known among photographers in Berlin but we were less familiar as a tech employer. Attracting the best candidates would mean becoming established on the local tech scene.
We began by hosting coding workshops — fundamentals of Python, JavaScript and related technologies, taught to beginners in our spacious central Berlin offices.
Since moving to Berlin from the USA ten years ago I’ve become involved in the local Python community, organising events for Django Girls (a non-profit dedicated to increasing diversity in the developer community), doing interviews for podcasts, and speaking at conferences. I had enough contacts to make a start.
It might seem counterintuitive to hold beginner coding classes to find seasoned engineers, but where you have learners you must also have teachers.
In fact, seeing how someone shares skills and mentors in an informal setting gives a pretty good idea of what they might bring to a senior position.
We set up our first workshop via codebar, which has a focus on increasing diversity and inclusion in the tech world — an issue that’s important to us at MPB. Since MPB also hosts codebar in our Brighton headquarters, it was only natural to start there.
codebar was better known in the UK than in Germany at the time but we kept on networking and building buy-in, and we now have about 20 people at a time learning web technologies, data science and more. For our last event, we combined with Django Girls, Humble Data and PyLadies, hosting around 40 people.
Not limiting ourselves only to coding workshops, we recently began planning to host Django User Group, which is focused on more experienced coders working with technologies we already use in our products.
As well as hosting our own events we’re preparing ourselves to go to conferences, give talks and create online content. It might take a little longer to work up material and be invited to share it, but it’s a great experience for both our engineers and for the visibility of MPB as a tech employer.
Above all, you have to follow through with this kind of outreach. Being part of a community means, well, being part of it — you can’t build a reputation for doing the right thing only to then let it go.
Cultural appropriateness
Everyone who works in an English-speaking office must surely have a tale around “cultures divided by a common language”.
After one meeting in which opinions differed over how things had actually gone, I had to ask whether anyone had said, “it’s not ideal” — a pretty damning phrase in UK English but it might suggest the opposite to anyone unfamiliar with the idiom.
For those whose first language isn’t English, there’s the added issue of simply not understanding a rarely-used word or high-context phrase. Even for native speakers, UK-specific business jargon can be unfamiliar or confusing if we’ve never worked there.
Our Berlin office is English-speaking, though that has more to do with the business culture there than it does with MPB’s British roots. New start-ups are established in Berlin every day, far more than Germany alone can staff. It’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope of cultures in which most parts of the globe are represented. Everyone here seems to be from somewhere else, and we all have friends and colleagues from diverse cultural backgrounds.
What this means is that people have many different communication needs, working styles and expectations. Even within Berlin, corporate and start-up business cultures are unalike, and both can be contrasted with working styles in the rest of Germany.
This can be challenging in several ways. There’s the basic issue of understanding, which we find ourselves working around with non-verbal cues, with emoji, and by maintaining a sense of humour. Erin Meyer’s book The Culture Map is a must-read for anyone working in this space.
We also need to establish common expectations. Our working times and hybrid model are more reflective of our UK roots than the average Berlin startup, and so are some of our ways of working — it’s important we make that clear at the outset.
Finally, we need to integrate our people in Berlin with their peers in the UK, so that everyone can work together with a shared understanding.
That means ensuring everyone on the Berlin engineering team spends time in Brighton, getting to know the systems and people. Afterwards they join regular calls remotely from Berlin, so they’re still connected to their UK-based colleagues.
Space to grow
We’re lucky enough to have a big, beautiful, spacious office in central Berlin, close to the city’s beating heart. That in itself helps attract people to work here.
It’s a giant open-plan space, with one floor holding the inspection and dispatch operations and the other containing … well, everyone else, from HR to marketing to the Vice-President (Europe).
That alone means different parts of the business feel like part of a greater whole. We work quite openly and invite colleagues to drop by and chat when we’re in the office. People are always excited to meet new colleagues and that has its benefits for the company as a whole — the better we know each other’s roles and requirements, the better we can meet them.
The other week we sat down with a trainer from the Customer Experience team, who showed us how he does what he does — these are people using the software we create and it’s incredibly useful to understand each other’s needs.
We also have a common lounge, a full kitchen and a beautiful terrace with great views. Most of us have lunch together on the 4th floor so there are always opportunities to mingle and chat with people in other departments.
Final thoughts
If you’re setting up your first distributed engineering team I hope you’ve found something above helpful to think about. Every organisation is different and you’ll no doubt face other challenges and opportunities, but some of the issues I’ve talked about are probably familiar the world over.
And if you’re an engineer looking for opportunities to spread your wings in Germany’s happeningest city, don’t forget to check out our dedicated careers portal — who knows, we might even end up talking about these things and more in the autumn.
Lisa Quatmann is a Senior Engineering Manager at MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video gear. mpb.com
