Why Company Culture is Important to Your Career as a Software Engineer

As a software engineer, you may be tempted to focus solely on the technical aspects of a potential job—the tech stack, the product, the compensation. But there‘s another critical factor that will shape your day-to-day experience and long-term career growth even more: the company culture.

What exactly is company culture? It‘s the set of values, beliefs, behaviors and practices that characterize an organization. You can think of it as the company‘s personality. Culture permeates every aspect of the work environment, from how decisions get made to how employees interact to what gets rewarded and prioritized.

For software engineers, company culture has an enormous impact on your ability to do your best work, learn and grow, maintain work-life balance, and collaborate effectively with colleagues. Let‘s dive into the specific ways company culture will shape your experience as a software engineer.

Your day-to-day experience

The company culture will heavily influence what it feels like to work at an organization day-to-day. Is the environment relaxed and autonomous or high-pressure and micromanaged? Is risk-taking encouraged or blamed? Do people generally trust and respect each other? Do meetings tend to be productive or wasteful?

Software engineers thrive in cultures where they are given ownership over their work and trusted to make decisions. We do our best work when we have the space to focus deeply on complex tasks without being micromanaged or pulled into unnecessary meetings. Research shows autonomy is one of the biggest drivers of employee motivation and job satisfaction.

In contrast, cultures of constant surveillance, mistrust, and bureaucracy kill motivation and creativity for software engineers. If you feel like you‘re being watched and judged constantly, it‘s extremely difficult to concentrate on challenging tasks and innovate. A 2019 report by Dice found that the top reason tech workers left their jobs was "lack of trust and autonomy."

Your ability to learn and grow

To advance in your career as a software engineer, you need opportunities to tackle new challenges, learn new skills, get feedback, and step into leadership roles. The company culture will determine whether you have those opportunities.

Some companies heavily invest in employee learning and development, with things like:

• Dedicated training budgets for conferences, courses, and books
• Regular "hack days" or "20% time" to learn new skills
• Mentorship programs pairing junior and senior engineers
• Collaborative cultures where feedback flows freely

Netlify, for example, gives every employee a $2,000 annual learning stipend to spend on books, courses, conferences, or coaching. They also host regular "fedex days" where engineers get dedicated time to experiment and build something new.

Others invest little in employee growth and even discourage it, expecting you to get your work done as quickly as possible without "wasting time" on learning. They may have cultures where it‘s taboo to give candid feedback to colleagues. Over time, that lack of investment really limits career growth.

The impact on job satisfaction and retention

The data consistently shows that company culture has an enormous impact on software engineers‘ job satisfaction and willingness to stick around. A 2021 survey of over 1200 developers by Haystack found:

• Developers who gave their company culture a good rating were 3.2X more likely to be extremely satisfied with their jobs
• 43% of developers who rated their culture as bad were actively looking for a new job vs. just 12% at companies with healthy cultures
• "Team culture" was the 2nd most cited reason for leaving a previous job, behind only compensation

Toxic company cultures take a toll on employees and lead to high attrition rates, which are costly for the business. The average cost to replace a software engineer is over $30K. But the impact goes beyond just the replacement costs. Constant turnover makes it hard to build institutional knowledge and tackle complex, long-term projects. It‘s also demoralizing for the engineers who remain.

As Avinash Conda, engineering manager at Stripe put it: "Engineers can put up with a less-than-ideal culture for a little while, but not forever. Eventually they burn out and leave."

Work-life balance

Company culture also heavily shapes your ability to maintain work-life balance and attend to responsibilities and interests outside of work. Some companies respect employees‘ time off and don‘t expect them to be constantly available. Others have "always on" cultures where overwork is the norm and taking time off is tacitly discouraged.

As a software engineer, having time to disconnect from work is critical for avoiding burnout and maintaining your mental health. Overwork is a huge problem in the tech industry. In a 2018 survey by LinkedIn, 49% of technology workers said they were stressed "most of the day" and 70% said they checked emails and responded to messages outside of work.

The vast majority of engineers perform at their best when they work a sustainable pace of about 40 hours per week. Research has shown that productivity drops sharply after 50 hours per week and completely falls off a cliff after 55 hours. Sacrificing free time to work more only leads to stress, disengagement and sloppy code. Companies with healthy cultures recognize this and respect engineers‘ time.

Gitlab, for example, has a strong culture of "family and friends first, work second." All employees are encouraged to take vacations, set boundaries around working hours, and limit after-hours communication. Contrast that to Amazon, which has become infamous for its culture of overwork, with devastating stories of engineers working themselves to physical and mental breakdown.

Collaboration and psychological safety

Modern software development is a team sport requiring collaboration with designers, product managers, marketers, support reps, and other engineers. Effective collaboration depends on having a culture of open communication, psychological safety, and mutual respect.

Google spent years studying what makes effective teams and found that psychological safety was the single most important factor. Psychological safety means feeling safe to speak up, ask questions, point out mistakes, and share ideas without being judged or criticized. In toxic cultures where people fear being blamed or punished for mistakes, collaboration is destroyed.

Etsy is well-known for its culture of psychological safety and blameless postmortems. When something goes wrong, the focus is on the situational factors that led to the mistake, not on punishing individuals. This creates an environment where engineers feel safe to take risks and innovate.

Psychological safety doesn‘t mean lowering your standards. The highest performing teams actually make more mistakes along the way to success. But they‘re able to innovate and iterate quickly because people feel safe to experiment and learn from failures.

Evaluating culture while interviewing

Throughout the interview process, pay attention to signs a company culture may be toxic:

• Interviewers bad-mouth current or past employees
• High employee turnover rate (ask how long team members have been there)
• Everyone looks stressed and burnt out when you visit the office
• Vague or canned answers to questions about career growth and training
• Lack of flexibility around schedule and time off

Also look out for language that glorifies overwork, like expecting "superstars" to regularly burn the midnight oil. Patagonia‘s Dean Carter puts it well: "If you‘re working 60 to 70 hours a week, you‘re not doing your job well. You‘re creating more work for other people."

On the flip side, look for these promising signs of a healthy culture:

• Interviewers are genuinely passionate about the mission and product
• Employees have been there for several years and advanced through different roles
• The office is inviting, people are smiling and socializing
• Clear examples of how the company invests in employee learning and growth
• People feel comfortable taking time off and disconnecting
• Transparent and direct communication that welcomes tough questions

How can you probe deeper into the culture while interviewing? In addition to asking the standard questions about daily responsibilities, advancement opportunities, and management style, try these:

• How are major decisions made here? Can you share an example of how the team navigated a difficult decision?
• Tell me about a time someone on the team made a mistake. How was it handled? What was the impact?
• How do you make space for learning and innovation vs. just executing on the roadmap?
• What are some of the best things about working here? What are the biggest challenges?
• How does the company support work-life balance?

Really listen to how they respond. Do they have specific, authentic examples or do they speak in vague generalities? Are the positives and negatives they cite deal-breakers for you?

The long-term impact

I‘ve experienced the impact of company culture first-hand over my 15+ years as a software engineer and engineering leader. Early in my career, I worked at a large company with a pretty toxic culture. Decisions were made top-down, engineers were constantly firefighting, and finger-pointing was the norm whenever something went wrong. I dreaded going to work, consistently worked 60+ hour weeks, and was so burnt out that I barely had energy for anything outside of work. Unsurprisingly, that company had very high turnover.

When I finally left for a smaller startup with a much healthier culture, it was night and day. I was surrounded by kind, passionate people who valued collaboration and psychological safety. We pair programmed, held blameless postmortems, and prioritized learning. Work was challenging but energizing. I looked forward to interacting with my teammates and felt safe being vulnerable. That experience was a turning point in my career. I realized how much company culture influenced not just my day-to-day, but my long-term happiness and growth.

Conclusion

Company culture has an enormous impact on your experience and career trajectory as a software engineer. It influences how happy, motivated and fulfilled you feel day-to-day, how fast you learn and grow, how collaboratively you work with colleagues, and how much time and space you have for a life outside of work.

Don‘t underestimate the importance of finding a team whose cultural values align with yours. The technical problems you work on will inevitably change as you advance in your career. But cultural issues like lack of trust and overwork will persistently undermine your ability to thrive and do your best work.

As you evaluate potential jobs, don‘t just chase brand names, shiny tech stacks, or big compensation packages. Dig deep into the company culture and values. Optimize for an environment where you will be trusted, supported, and empowered to grow. Finding a culture fit takes time and effort, but it will pay enormous dividends for your long-term career success and happiness.