DEV Community

Cover image for Engineering Culture in a Remote Team
Rauno Metsa
Rauno Metsa

Posted on

Engineering Culture in a Remote Team

What would you like to know about remote company's engineering culture before considering to join them?

I currently have 1,700+ remote companies listed on my site RemoteHub – you can search for remote teams based on their size, tech stack, benefits and more. Teams have also listed 1,200+ remote cities they work from.

I'm now starting to find out more about their development culture – my plan is to list some engineering topics and ask them to choose what fits with a quick description:

Choose engineering topics

So far I've came up with the following list:

👋 Daily standups
🤝 Pair programming
⚡️ Agile software development
🚚 Continuous delivery
🔓 Open source contributor
👶 Good for junior devs

I could then add these to my filters on the remote companies page and combining them with the existing options you could run searches something like "small remote companies with company retreats and daily standups hiring now".

Remote companies

What would you like to know about remote company's engineering culture?

Top comments (6)

Collapse
 
stevezieglerva profile image
Steve Ziegler

This is a great idea. Maybe something around the following: learning/sharing/training culture, team communications, advancement

Collapse
 
johnson_cor profile image
Corey Johnson

I think this is awesome!! I agree with Steve: Learning & sharing culture is huge.

Collapse
 
raunometsa profile image
Rauno Metsa

Thanks Steve – I think that's great! I will have my culture questions as checkboxes (on/off = exists in their culture or not) as they need to be available from the filters when you're searching remote teams:

remotehub.io/remote-companies

I'm trying to phrase learning/sharing/training as an on/off switch, what do you think:

Learning & Sharing

Would be also good to know how team communications happen (sync/async? chat app? email?), but I don't know how to phrase it as yes/no for the filters.

Maybe I need to ask this on the about page separate from the engineering culture (I have different sections: about, benefits, tools, cities, jobs, engineering culture).

Collapse
 
stevezieglerva profile image
Steve Ziegler

The binary choices and simple design for these items make sense, especially if this is a labor of love. "Learning & Sharing" is good. Your users will get it.

When I mentioned communications, I was actually thinking about global teams and timezone complications and if that made it hard for remote workers. Maybe "Good team communications support?"

Is the site meant for pure remote companies or companies that support some remote work?

Thread Thread
 
raunometsa profile image
Rauno Metsa

Yes, maybe something like this – thanks!

It's for both really! 100% and partly remote.

I've been thinking how to ask this from companies – how remote are you? I guess % is one option, but it makes it too complicated I think (we're 60% remote). I currently have a checkbox:

Remote first – hiring and working from all over the world instead of from a central location

and you can find companies based on that. I think that's enough. Probably I don't care to search for companies who are 30% or 50% remote, but I would like to to know if they are in a "remote first" mindset or not (office + two remote devs). Also, this % changes all the time!

Anyways, all comments about remotehub.io are very helpful! It's work in progress.

Collapse
 
thejoezack profile image
Joe Zack

I think it would be really useful to know if the job or team is fully remote, or partial.