Shuhong’s career at Facebook lasted for over six years before he decided to explore something and boost his career growth by joining another company. However, he returned to Facebook within a year because he realized the kind of impact he envisioned making was possible only at Facebook because of the engineering culture of the organization.
With platforms like Turing, businesses have it easy to source and recruit the best software developers for their company. However, hiring engineers and ensuring that they stay with your company for the long term is different.
You need to focus on the career growth of your engineers to build trust and improve your employee engagement and retention rate.
If your engineers don’t feel valued, they will look for organizations that care about their career growth.
In a recent post, Shuhong W., currently the Enterprise Engineering Manager at the Meta office in Singapore, shares key aspects of culture and environment at Facebook that businesses can implement to promote personal and career growth for engineers.
The career growth of an engineer heavily depends on the company’s culture
When Shuhong joined Facebook as a junior individual contributor, he remembers feeling a sense of imposter syndrome. It felt like the entire organization consisted of superhumans who did extraordinary things, he says.
However, he quickly realized that the culture at Facebook brought out the best in people.
According to Shuhong, if a company focuses on embracing their engineers’ strengths, helps them realize their potential, and offers opportunities for career growth, they’ll successfully create a culture that encourages everyone to excel.
Your engineers don’t need to master everything; they only have to focus on their primary skills. This single-minded focus from your software engineers will help them boost their career growth and prove invaluable for your business’s success.
Trust your engineers to make decisions
While making all the decisions yourself may seem efficient, this type of micromanagement creates a highly toxic work environment. In addition to this, capable engineers feel stressed and undervalued, which directly affects their morale.
As an engineering manager, you need to loosen the reins and empower your team to make decisions without you.
Most organizations have a frustratingly long pipeline of people in the decision-making process, which hinders the company’s growth, autonomy, and innovation.
Facebook built its enterprise engineering team with the mindset of taking risks, being bold, and most importantly, trusting each other, says Shuhong.
If you trust your engineers to make decisions by themselves, they will step up and do the task to the best of their ability to impress you.
Ensure that your team knows you have their back regardless of the outcome; this will empower them to get better at making decisions and proactively learn from their mistakes.
However, being a good leader is not just about establishing trust within your team. You need to build the same connection with your superiors. Stand up to your manager if you feel strongly about something. While you may feel like they might be offended, that’s usually not the case.
In fact, challenging their leadership to stop them from making poor decisions will increase your trust in leading your team effectively.
Summary
In today’s world, software developers are the most significant investment for any business. Therefore, building a culture to encourage their career growth is an excellent way to boost their satisfaction and ensure they stay with your company.
You can implement the practices that Shuhong has identified during his career at Facebook to ensure that your business culture promotes personal and professional development for software developers.
If you’re looking to hire qualified software developers for your company, Turing can help. Turing is a deep jobs platform that allows companies to source skilled and experienced engineers planet-wide.
You’ll have access to a talent pool of the top 1% of 1M talented and experienced developers with strong technical and communication skills who can work according to your requirements.
Additionally, Turing’s tried-and-tested vetting process evaluates developers to a Silicon Valley standard allowing you to have your pick of qualified software developers without sucking up all of your engineering team’s time.
Source: Meta
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Career Growth Lessons from a Facebook Enterprise Engineer
Description
Enterprise Engineering Manager at Facebook shares key aspects of culture that companies can implement to promote personal and career growth for engineers
Jaya is a copywriter & content writer & has worked for businesses in over 27 different niches. When she’s not writing, she can be found obsessing over a book.
