growth

a few years ago my company was acquired, and it was a rocky ride integrating to say the least. lots of mistakes were made, but as i always say, all is not lost from mistakes unless you don’t learn from them. and lots of learning i did.

one of the things that stood out, and was a core reason for strife, was the incongruent cultures around continuous learning and growth. when i get into something new, foreign, or unfamiliar, i have a relentless knack for being an absolute sponge on anything and everything i can get my hands on. this seminal experience was no different.

as i became more familiar with “how things were done” at this new org, and how the product worked, it became readily apparent they did not value growth and learning as much as i did. the engineering culture was abysmal. in hindsight, i understand more about how they got there now (a self proclaimed product org, but everything they did screamed project/services org), but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a very amateur environment as far as good practices go.

a few examples off the top of my head were non-repeatable onboarding and deployments, no versioning or migration strategy for their databases, no automated testing, and not staying abreast of modern development practices like ci/cd and dora. i did a poor job of masking my appall, and that was a mistake on my part. it was absolutely a factor in unnecessary strife.

all that to say, at the end of the day, any engineering organization that doesn’t put a high value on continuously learning and improving is one that is not going to last. it will also drive away your highest performers quickly.

no engineer worth their salt can be met with “we’ve always done it that way” and live with it. and likewise, no engineer worth their salt should be the one repeating that idiom either.

in a software engineering career, and in startups, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.