How to make an engineering team stand out

As I’ve been reflecting on work I’ve done that I enjoyed vs work that I didn’t, one thing has consistently stood out to me. Each opportunity had something that stood out about the engineering or product culture. The thing is, there are a lot of different levers you can pull here, and it’s interesting seeing teams that don’t pull any of these levers (the most boring jobs to work). The following are a (non-exhaustive) list of ways an engineering team stands out:

1. Unique language choice

Some companies stand out because of the tooling they use to build their technology, which has a huge influence on a lot of other decisions, as well as the people who are attracted to your team. For example, a company like Bun uses Zig, an unconventional language choice. A good friend of mine loves ReasonML/OCaml. It’s not that you have to have a large audience of people who agree with your tooling choices - but having some opinion gets you to stand out for the right engineer.

2. Unique approach to using “boring” tools

Many companies pride themselves on using “boring” technology - they don’t want to use anything too new, just things that are tried and tested. A company that sticks out meaningfully amongst the sea of companies like this is Zerodha. They self-host and use open-source software for their entire technology stack. When I say everything, I mean literally everything, including their HR systems to manage their employees. It’s a incredibly rare but principled approach to building technology, and one that most wouldn’t recommend for a variety of reasons, but they made it work. They have a product team of ~30 engineers and do $800M in revenue, entirely bootstrapped (as of 2023), and almost no PMs or designers.

3. Compensation

Companies like Netflix stand out because they project a culture of high-performance, high-pay. Others may offer unusually high equity. How effective this is on its own to attract great engineering talent is up for debate, but it’s certainly a useful lever for those who can pull it.

4. Autonomy

I’ve worked at a startup that offered me significant autonomy, almost to a fault. Due to that, I learned so much about building products. When you give people who deeply desire self-actualization the proper space to do so, it’s surprising the magic you can create with the right guardrails in place.

5. Unique problems

Some products are built based on solving things that have never been solved in history, or otherwise extremely challenging problems. Like Sam Altman says, it’s easier to build a hard company than an easy company. Sometimes interesting problems are hidden in plain sight, and it might require some communication on your part to show engineers why it’s an interesting problem. A lot of seemingly boring problems (e.g. something to do with taxes) can easily be written off if people don’t get a strong sense of why it might be interesting.

There are many other levers one could pull, such as a unique approach to product or design, working on open-source projects, etc. But there has to be something. You can’t offer average/below-average pay, no interesting problems, no autonomy, and also have no unique approach to your technology, assuming you want to attract engineers that stand out. Pretty much every engineer that I’ve worked with that stands out amongst other engineers has something they care about or some unique approach to something that puts them ahead of other engineers (this is basically a tautology).

There are a variety of reasons why a company may lack a good engineering culture (or a culture at all). For example, smaller companies can often have engineers that aren’t experienced or thoughtful enough to make principled decisions, and just do whatever it takes to get the job done.

On the contrary, I’ve actually worked at a company with experienced engineers that took pride in this extreme simplicity. They wanted to use the most tried and true technologies, in the same way everyone else does. And none of the other levers I mentioned were pulled either. Unfortunately in today’s world, I don’t think that works to attract engineering talent. Great engineers care about things that bring meaningful improvements to their life, whether that’s building a unique or standout skillset, new knowledge, higher pay, and/or autonomy. You can’t avoid offering all of these things and expect to hire capable talent. If I put your company on a map next to a bunch of other companies, why should anyone work for you over anyone else?