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by ctraynor 3214 days ago
These are interesting but fairly generic and easy for a company to claim many to look good.

When defining culture I think it's best to avoid generalisations and have specifics:

- If something breaks, what is more important: Preserving state for debuggability or getting online fast

- Developers can always say they are not ready to push and continue testing

- There are defined SLI's and error budgets

- Design docs are required for new functionality

- Senior developers are expected to {mentor junior developers, be proactive in creating tooling, understand the full technology stack, refactor}

- Sliding scale of time spent on feature development vs keeping on top of technical debt

- How much time is spent on automation

- Are there well defined leadership tracks for technical and management (a yes/no isn't really enough here)

- Onboarding/mentoring, paired with a senior developer or a hire that joined ~6 months ago

There are a lot more engineering culture questions based on ownership, communication, personal development and specific engineering tradeoffs.