Welcome to the Team

Take your job seriously. Don't take yourself too seriously.

The best engineers I've worked with are the ones who care deeply about their craft and can still laugh at themselves. That combination is rarer than it sounds, but I'm lucky enough to have many of them on my team.

And please don't take me too seriously either. For most engineers on my team, I'm the manager of their manager, and people are just wired to feel some level of intimidation by hierarchy, whether you want to or not (and clearly I do not).

I utilize my monthly “all hands” meetings to work against it. During this meeting we cover team updates and demo new functionality. You know how when you're on hold, there's the "waiting music"? Well at some point someone proposed we should have waiting music, while we "wait for folks to trickle in". Great idea! For the past few years, we open each all hands with a random song I pick from YouTube. It sets the tone right away: let's just have a bit of fun and let's not take ourselves too seriously. We even have a playlist of all the songs on Spotify! :)

At the end of each meeting, the final slide opens it up for “Questions, comments, or silly jokes”. It has a dad joke that I've pulled from somewhere, which is often guaranteed for a few eyerolls. But these things are deliberate and important! I want people to feel comfortable, see me as the leader, but also as a regular person who isn't afraid to laugh at himself and who is approachable.

Speak up. Good or bad.

I encourage people to tell me what they want to work on. What excites them. What they want to grow into. What kind of work they want to do more of. Sure, sometimes you'll be told what to work on, but let's make sure it's a 2-way street. People who work on things that excite them simply do better work.

The flip side is equally important: tell me when something isn't working. But here's the thing: speaking up isn't easy. It requires trust. And trust has to be earned.

The way I earn it is through transparency. Some call it my Dutch bluntness, because I grew up in the Netherlands. When something isn't working, I call it out and make it clear we're going to try to fix it. The message is always the same: it's fine to say what sucks, as long as we stay constructive about it. We see it, we name it, we fix it.

There's a specific reaction I've come to expect the first time a new team member hears me say, out loud, that something sucks. You can almost see the thought forming: "Wait, aren't you leadership? Aren't you supposed to tell us everything is exactly how we planned it?" That moment of surprise is usually when the trust starts.

When they see me call something out openly, it signals that it's safe for them to do the same. As most managers, I was an engineer before this. And what I learned was that venting to your coworkers about things that aren't going well feels good for about five minutes and often changes nothing. Bringing it to your manager is its own kind of scary. I get that. So I try hard to build an environment where people feel safe saying the thing out loud. There's a third thing, though, that ties the first two together.

Have some fun.

Yes, we have plenty of serious conversations. But there should also be room to be direct and poke a little fun at each other. To tell the person who's consistently longwinded that they need to get to the point already. Or to ask your Brazilian coworker how their soccer team did, knowing full well they already lost. You have a laugh. It creates a bond. It makes the team real.

That bond matters most when things aren't going well. When you need to stay late to fix an incident, it's a lot easier to grind through the hard stuff when you actually like the people next to you.

Every four years, I run a World Cup pool across the whole org. With a team spread across multiple countries, it's a rare thing everyone can argue about that has nothing to do with sprints or deadlines, and it's turned into one of the best team-building exercises I've got, no offsite budget required.

If you enjoy what you work on and have an intrinsic sense of motivation, you'll do your best work. So I try to give people work they actually want to do, not just work that needs doing. When someone's genuinely into a project, it shows: the pace picks up, the quality goes up, and I don't need to hover over them checking in. My job at that point is mostly to get out of the way.

It works!

Culture isn't a set of values on a wall. It's the specific things you say and do when new people arrive. If you're consistent, it compounds.

What surprised me was how quickly a team culture spreads by reputation. When I inherited a team of 11 engineers from a different part of the org, several of them told me they'd already heard about my team's culture and were excited to finally be part of it. I hadn't advertised anything.

But I guess it's not complicated: we treat people like grownups, and word gets around. Voluntary attrition across my whole org has stayed consistently low, well below the industry norm. Meanwhile, I regularly get approached by engineers from other teams, asking if there's a possibility to switch teams to my org. What better compliment than that!?