Building the Unbabel culture — Engineering Day

As is the way in our early-21st-century western civilisation, most people work for a living.

Why do we work? For money? Fulfilment? Distraction? Whatever your motivation, you'll be spending much (if not most) of your valuable time with other people, so you might as well make the most of it.

An engineering culture is a lot more about the human component than the 0s and 1s of keeping servers live.

There are two fundamental parts of the functional human being; the professional and the personal. To grow a healthy engineering culture it's necessary to nurture each side.

On the professional side of things, it's crucial that the tools you use get sharpened once in a while, and that you also acquire better tools for new jobs as they emerge. Above all, you must recognise that getting better at what you do isn’t an option; it’s a must. Self improvement is like water — be like water, my friend.

As for the personal — we are all emotional beings, and we all react differently to different stimuli, however, happiness is a commonly accepted currency here. The DNA of a culture is usually made of things that trigger happiness and moments shared in that process.

Growing a team at Startup Warp Speed is highly demanding, and sometimes things/routines get left behind, either because you outgrow them or because they don't scale. But at Unbabel, people and culture always come first, they are the foundations for what makes us cowabunga-awesome.

With this I hope to inspire more people and companies to recognise how important and valuable the well-being of those they work with are, and somehow, find a way to grow with it.

One of the initiatives we've created is the "Unbabel Engineering Day" — a full day of events designed to foster both the professional and personal sides of our lives together.

Tech Talks

We started out by getting together for the morning away from the office, at nearby Beta-i, for a set of talks. The first was delivered by Job van der Voort, VP of Product at GitLab on shipping product!

After this we shared some coffee and cookies over thoughts and feelings on the topic.

Up next was Mauro Martins, Product Delivery Manager at Feedzai, talking about growing a team for success!

Sharing different experiences and roads contribute to expand the perspective we have on the everyday things that come our way.

Before wrapping up and going off to lunch I talked a bit about my latest obsession, Muda, Muri and Mura (Toyota Production System).

All talks done, we separated into several teams for the after-lunch activity — War Games.

War Games

Talks are always cool, but they provide more nurturing than activity. So after lunch, each team was assigned an awesome hacking spot where they needed to go to before the activity commenced.

Back at the office, our DevOps team created a set of fake environments (apps, tools and services) and assigned a couple to each team. The next step involved them simulating a number of malicious attacks on these systems, such as viruses, DDoS, connection outages, etc.

Over the next 90 minutes, the remote teams had to maintain all apps, servers and tools running no matter what.

Some teams learned on the fly how to fix things that usually the DevOps team has to deal with and others cooperated with each other until all services were back to normal.

It was interesting to see people coming together to fix things and even teams trying to cheat (by revoking the DevOps team's ssh keys so they couldn't deliver more challenges), but hey, you do what you gotta do. ;)

It was frenetic, funny and fun, with lots of takeaways, but, it was time to bounce…

Bounce

War Games complete, a bus arrived to collect us at 4pm, taking us to the crazy world of endless trampolins and elastic mattresses, BOUNCE!

I could explain what it is, but it's better if you just watch the video, this s**t was insanely awesome!!!

Dinner

Physically exhausted (it’s harder than it looks!), we boarded the bus once more for a (pleasantly silent) trip to dinner.

What better way to end the day than over a shared meal?

Takeaways - TL;DR

A healthy working culture is a lot more than sharing a meal, working together really well and doing a great job. It’s what glues everything together and supports the growth of any team.

There isn't a playbook to create a good culture (trust me, I've looked for it). I fundamentally believe that ordinary people can do extraordinary things together, but the appropriate environment needs to exist.

A book called Peopleware describes this as a “gelling effect”, something on the subspace channels that holds everything together, fills in the void and binds people.

Reaching this “gelling effect” takes time, it takes effort, but most of all it takes dedication to the people working with you. Acknowledging that we’re all different and allowing the culture to be enriched with the different experiences of new people (instead of trying to match people to the culture) is key.

Building the "right" culture will depend on many things, but people and their wellbeing always come first. Do that, and make sure you have fun along the way.