What Engineers Want

Choose your hard.

While the title sounds awfully similar to feel-good movies “What Women Want” (2000) starring Mel Gibson, and sequel “What Men Want” (2019) starring Taraji P. Henson, unfortunately I haven’t been able to harness same mind reading abilities as main characters in the movies 🙂

However, I had a chance to talk, and in some cases collaborate and lead, engineers from different backgrounds: academic, freelancing, IT services and consulting, product companies, etc.

When talking about being fulfilled and feeling valuable at work, positive answers were often determined by following things:

Clear Vision

Every organisation needs a “North Star”. It determines the direction of organisation not just from Product but also from Engineering perspective. Clear vision means when plans A, B, C… are not working, engineers can adapt and look at the alternative paths, and continue forward. Clear vision also means having a reference to measure progress. Making progress can lead to growth, reaching potential, and making an impact. In practical sense, having a good North Star means outlining what are you trying to achieve, and set of principles or base truths that should help engineers get correct course in case of doubts, disagreements, etc. This can be further refined per department, group, team, pod, project etc.

Beside clarity, another import aspect is the scope. If the vision is not ambitious, often no amount of clarity can make it attractive and meaningful to engineers.

Mission and Role

If the vision is clear and ambitious, there should be enough large problems to work on. A team with a single mission where everyone has specific roles enables ownership of results and accountability. It also creates environment to focus in-depth at particular domain problem.

Mandate and Autonomy

There are few things more demotivating than having engineers with a challenging mission not being empowered to make decisions. It is important to have decision making framework and proper guardrails. However, adding unnecessary “red tape” processes, involving many layers of people for the sake of being informed, etc. can lead to delay in decisions and frustration.

These things seem simple and obvious, yet organisations keep doing same mistakes.

In essence…

Laying out clear vision is hard.
Having responsibility for structure and empowerment of teams is hard as well.
However, failed projects and talent attrition is also hard.

Choose your hard.