[matt_the_bass]

With all due respect to the other answers in other threads, it sounds to me that there is a toxic company culture if employees feel they need a “private” slack channel where they can post work appropriate messages without reprisal. I understand that a single dev can’t always fix the underlying problem and sometimes needs to focus on mitigating a symptom. But should the question really be “what can we do to fix the company culture”?

[idunno246]

I’m surprised that people want private channels so much. Most teams I’m on have been public only, and it’s never been an issue. Even private messages are frowned upon, better to have input from others. It’s especially annoying if someone from another team is asking for help but the context is hidden behind a wall.

And outside of engineering they generally self select out of the channel. Or we trust that the people we work with to understand that they aren’t the intended audience in those channels - they’re still welcome but usually don’t contribute.

[matt_the_bass]

Same here. We also have quiet offices with no more than 2 people per room for our devs. Maybe it’s no surprise we have a strong company culture.

[lostmyoldone]

Anecdotally, the answer is: In an overwhelming majority of the cases, not much.

It seems as engineers/programmers/etc are generally looked down upon by many in marketing, sales, and various management position regarding their ability to understand how a company should be "run", down to trivial things like how to plan an office space.

I don't have much issue with open office spaces, at least not well designed ones, but many engineers do, and all those engineers are demonstrably more productive in a space adapted to their work habitat preferences. And still, even where office space costs are a fraction of the costs, you see terrible open spaces. Almost always against the entire engineering departments wishes.

It almost has to be some sort of culture thing, as I've seen first hand how common engineering values such as openness, a relative objectivity, clarity of vision/direction, etc works when actually applied. They work amazing!

It was at this company, one that during the dotcom craze managed to retain engineers 3 times longer than the industry average. They constantly hit their deadlines, customer trust was sky high. All this with good velocity while having a technically very advanced product.

If I would name one thing that might have been the sauce that made it possible: You could not become a manager, go into sales without working 1st line support some amount of time until you knew the product(s)

I don't understand exactly why that seemed to have such a staggering effect, if it indeed was the cause, but I've never ever seen an org run even nearly as smooth as that one!

Maybe it helped people at all levels to understand intuitively, that a bold claim in a meeting room, doesn't fix the customer issues? Only a lot of hard work does.