Culture of Competency

A few years ago it was common to see “Technology is Easy; Culture is hard”. In the midst of a digital transformation I was initially pretty accepting of the phrase.

Until it began to gnaw.

Yes, culture is hard, but so is tech. And in fact the two are intrinsically linked, to the point of being indistinguishable from each other in practice. They go hand in hand.

You can’t solve one without the other.

Hustlers

Today, the current hard sell is to directly diminish technical talent.

The caricature is that the possession of tech skills renders you incapable of making logical business decisions, and the only real solution is to pay for hands-off fCTO services to be the adult in the room.

I poke fun at hiring a CTO who can’t do the job, because the idea that skills would render a candidate less capable is frankly ridiculous, to the point that buying into it suggests its own competency issues.

Why competency matters

Obviously your tech competency might not matter much if you’re running a pub, so rather than get into an “it depends” argument — because, well, yes, it does — I’m focusing on companies that invest in and sell technology solutions, like a SaaS business.

In such a business your tech org is the engine that delivers revenue. Their competency is measured in part by how quickly, safely and accurately they can do that.

Of course, there are trade-offs. If you go a bit quicker, you might be a bit less safe, but in a tech org, competency-based automation is a huge multiplier, with outcomes such as:

Low competence

• Layers of change control beyond the typical technical tools are added, slowing releases, resulting in more complex, more error prone releases.
• The larger, slower releases are more difficult to debug and integrate, consuming more and more development time.
• Layers of expensive bureaucracy are added, further diminishing the ability to release revenue generating software.
• Change is hard, personalities rule the roost, and multi-year silver bullet projects are suggested as the solution. They’re expensive and they don’t work.

High competence

• Software releases are automated and run often. The result is releases are uniform, well tested, and uneventful.
• More releases result in simpler change-sets, that themselves are less likely to go wrong.
• When you do have an issue with a release, the smaller change-set makes it easier to identify and rectify, and your team will be doing a retrospective on how it happened, and more importantly, how they can stop it from happening again in the future.
• The process will continue to improve until it’s mature. It’s surgical and evidence based. The change is gradual and continuous, and it does result in change.
• There are fewer non-jobs, less busywork and fewer side-quests, so the team is cheaper overall.

There are many different examples outwith release, such as tech debt, silver bullets and architecture, but the takeaway is that in a competent org you get to take a lot more shots within the same time-frame, and those shots land more often.

So whilst Sales, Product, Marketing and other departments are important and have their roles to play, they tend to do better when Engineering is highly capable of delivering software.

Setting the tone

Going back to the initial complaint. Culture is hard. When you hire technical leadership that doesn’t have tangible tech competency, the cultural anchors are: “skills don’t matter”, and “that’s someone else’s problem”.

No amount of misappropriating Netflix cultural values is going to suddenly change behaviour.

In fact the “no asshole” rule will be actively abused at this point to remove contentious opinions such as “maybe we’re not very good at this, and maybe we should do better”, because resolution at this point will most likely cause people to lose their jobs.

Reward might, but that’s an entirely unrealistic proposition when said executive is now offshoring development to the cheapest location, because, as we’ve learnt, skills don’t matter.

Let’s say we at least try.

Who do you reward when you lack the fundamental knowledge to differentiate between the argument “maybe we should fix our indexes” and “we need to use mongo because it’s webscale”?

Resolution

The horse has bolted. The org has already walked the path of skills don’t matter, albeit accidentally, and the large investment into software development isn’t paying off.

What do?

Besides, you know, better leadership.

Stop the bleeding

Fix the hiring process so you start asserting skills. Delete the cultural interviews because they’re frankly bollocks, and stop using stupid reasons to not hire folks, like they had too many pages on their CV.

Assess skills, focus on fundamentals, hire the best you can afford.

It’s at this point, if you’re doing your job right, that you’ll start to feel immense pressure from multiple sources:

• Recruiters will start pushing back, telling you that the process is too extreme and your requirements are unrealistic. This might be fair. It also might be because they’re on commission.
• Senior developers will start coming out of the woodwork to tell you that you don’t need the specific fundamental skills you’re assessing. This might be fair. It also might suggest they simply don’t have those skills, and rather than improve, they’d rather you not require them.
• Executives will raise this with you because it’s become political. Maybe you are misguided. Maybe they’re jockeying for position.

The important thing to remember is this is a long hard road, but the highly competent are those that make the start, whilst the others delay, waiting for a better option, because this is hard work and it won’t completely resolve the issue in one fell swoop.

Now things get messy

People will start self-selecting. They will leave, and not join, based on your attitude towards competency.

This is a positive thing, and actually turns this from an uphill battle to a downhill race, however it requires finesse. It’s important that the competent view you as fair, and that throughout this turbulent period they see light at the end of the tunnel and a brighter future ahead.

This means you need to be selling, and you need to be seen as credible, because some of their friends will leave, and they themselves will be recommended for new jobs.

This is where empathy and soft skills matter.

Move too fast and you’ll put undue burden on the institutional knowledge that keeps the lights on. Too slow, and you will succumb to politics.

Fin.

First ones for free

Yeah sure, gimme a shout. :)