Why Investing in Culture Should be Your Most Important Business Objective

I was having a discussion recently about company culture, something often talked about but rarely truly captured and lived by companies.

Have you ever worked somewhere where the culture seemed riddled with contradictions - website slogans which only ever seemed to be given voice in client meetings or interviews with prospective candidates? Colleagues who all knew what they were 'supposed' to feel about the company, but who really were all disconnected. Or perhaps you're a founder who knew clearly what your intention for your company culture was, but growth phases were met with clashes and high turnover.

Culture determines the people you attract, the quality of the people you attract affects the quality of the work you produce, which affects the clients you attract and the value of your work to them. Even if, like Amazon, who recently came under fire in the New York Times for their aggressive, relentless and somewhat merciless approach to their work and their employees' welfare, your culture is not as warm and fuzzy as many founders aspire to, at least it is defined and anticipated by new employees. People choose to work at Amazon because of the buzz that comes with a somewhat brutal work hard, play hard culture. I'd posit that this is better than having that culture but not being upfront about it, and thus not having the same high quality of employees looking to make their name.

The worst kinds of environment are those that fall in between an Amazon (cut-throat but ambitious and high quality) and those like Google who offer the same excellence with a seemingly warmer culture, an on-site doctor, and months of fully paid parental leave. Because having a clearly defined culture, whatever its nature, is better than having no culture at all, being bland, sounding like everybody else and being all talk.

Do not write down some words, send out a memo, and leave it at that. 

You literally need to live your culture from the top down. You need to reward people who demonstrate it. You need to invest significant amounts of time and money to help educate people about what you're trying to do, what your mission is and what your values are.

Most importantly, you need to embody them, and in public, visible ways. You need to make sure that everything you do, and everything you produce, has a coherent message and embodies what you stand for. When you hire, don't write a generic boring job spec with the same words everybody else does; market your company in such a way that you attract the kind of people you want to hire (like Google, embedding a secret coding challenge in their search engine).

Do not underestimate the importance of culture.

It runs throughout and affects everything you do, and everyone you come into contact with.

In a recent course I viewed on Udemy I saw this statistic: "57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier (B2B)".

This is because a customer's impression of you is coloured by what they see, and what they hear, and if you establish and live a truly clear culture, your employees and your clients will do all the positive talking for you. If you don't, you fight twice as hard for each sale.

How to Find Offices in London

A key part of a great company is often having somewhere centralised where people can come together into a creative and relaxing space and share their ideas but, in London, it's usually not that easy to find. In fact, if you're doing all the leg work yourself, it probably feels like you're ramming your head repeatedly into a wall. 


At YLD (where I'm now helping out with Ops and HR) we’re currently in the process of finding somewhere to lay our hats, and so thought it would be worth sharing some of the sources we’ve found useful (especially if you’re a start-up and/or have limited funds).

An important point to bear in mind, as with house hunting in London, is that if it’s on with an Estate Agent it’s probably already gone. For commercially licensed property there’s not too much advertised on mainstream sites like Rightmove anyway, but worth knowing.

Tips:

• Start looking early - probably a good 6 months before you actually need the space, if possible, as this will give you more choice.

• Decide what you need - is a private office essential, or could co-working space be an option? There are some great accelerators and co-working buildings you could look at, and these probably have a lot of facilities/infrastructure already in place which you can start using immediately.

• Decide how much work you want to do - if you want to use your existing network to find out what might be coming up (ask friends, colleagues, spread the word about what you’re looking for) or if you want to use a specialist to help with the search. They promise to take a lot of the pain out of the process, but they will charge a fee.

• Budget - have a clear idea of your budget and start to get a feel for different areas of London and what they cost. Some are very pricy but may not actually suit you best in terms of your travel needs. Something in Zone 2/3 might be more convenient and much cheaper. Think about Service Charges (charged for maintenance of your building) on top of Business Rates (payable to your local Council), electricity, gas, cleaning, internet and phone lines, as well as installing any desks/features. 

• Consider residential - decide if you want to go for a pre-licensed commercial property or get your own residential space and go through process of getting it licensed. May be easier to find.

Resources:

• General info: Government advice 
• Co-working space: Bathtub2Boardroom, WeWork, MinistryofStartups
• Agents/Consultants: MakingMoves, EstatesGazette, WorkSpace

Happy hunting - feel free to post your tips below :)

Where are all the front-end developers?

I found this brilliant blog post by Jose Aguinaga (here) and it got me thinking about the reasons behind the shortage of software developers in London - especially in front-end. I want to reflect on and summarize some of Jose's ideas and add a few of my own.

Context

I don't have the frustrating experience of many recruiters - when I speak to most companies, they tend to struggle to find developers, which makes it a much easier conversation for me! Often, they are happy to talk about the difficult condition of the market, and how I can help. That's a nice position to be in! But it leaves me with a problem to solve; I need to know where the front-end developers are...

It's Not as Challenging?

Jose quotes a user who points out that, since front-end development is easier than other fields of engineering, the shortage seems odd. It's a premise that I've come across in many conversations actually - particularly when speaking to back-end developers who believe their job is harder or, at least, more 'serious' engineering. I've also had clients comment they'd like 'a back-end developer who has turned to the front-end - but that never happens', as if front-end development is just a step one takes in the journey to becoming a 'proper' programmer. Perhaps this stigma (though diminishing quickly I would say) is still a reason why many developers don't focus on the front-end, abandoning it completely to move into back-end or choosing to use it as part of their full-stack skill set.

It's Misunderstood?

I think the big problem is distinguishing between being a 'front-end developer' and a 'front-end engineer'. Another of Jose's arguments is that front-end engineering is a relatively new area, with the 'engineering' part being added only recently. No longer is the front-end just visual design (not to undermine that, either), but what is technically demanded of the front-end is getting so much steeper. What many people might believe a front-end developer does is vastly underestimating the role, if you're looking at the responsibilities of a front-end engineer. Which skill set does a company need, what is it really looking for?

There is a Low Barrier to Entry?

One of my favourite points from Jose's post is that, because it is so easy for anybody to learn to code now (free online courses), anybody can learn HTML and CSS (a bit like I did...) and then call themselves a front-end developer, indistinguishable from a hard core front-end engineer. The fact that there are many bad or perhaps inauthentic front-end developers means that it is much harder to identify the good ones who have sound engineering principles mastered.

Lack of Exposure

There are, of course, many ways into programming, but it seems from my experience that a large number of the most passionate programmers I've met wrote their first lines of code at a very young age. Granted, this kind of personality was probably more likely to look in the right places to stumble across programming but, for many children, perhaps they just didn't have the exposure. I think this is something that will be changing over the next decade. Children are being taught programming now in the UK from as young as 5 years old. Besides this increase in audience engagement with the young, I also think the image of IT has changed drastically. No longer are programmers the humorous but socially awkward geeks of shows like The IT Crowd - they're millionaires, CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Game Changers. Brands like Facebook, Apple, Google, are sharp and attractive to young job seekers. If we, the general public, are to understand how our technological world works, then we need to step up and take an interest in how it all fits together. We know how to write in English, why not JavaScript? 

Becoming a true front-end engineer, master or mistress of your craft, demands time, practice, dedication and patience. The exciting thing, though, is that the front-end developers of the future are everywhere - they're children and students, they could be me; they could be you. 

Want to Work in a Start-up?

The start-up scene in London at the moment is booming.

Boris Johnson recently said there’s “nowhere to rival London for start-ups looking to thrive and grow", and it certainly seems the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ as well as the numerous incubators and accelerators are doing a good job of nurturing London’s new digital businesses.

There’s a large and buzzing community around start-ups, and often these are the kind of people who don’t need a recruiter’s help, as they already have plenty of contacts. Normally, I’ll only be brought in at about the second round of funding, when a lot of hiring needs to be done in a short time frame, and the founders have worked through most of their existing contacts, or when the founder is not technical.

If you spend a lot of time at events, and you network with the right people, then you probably know a lot about the start-up scene, and you know people who can fix you up with a great job at one.

If you don’t, though, then it can seem like a daunting move to make from the more corporate, hierarchical 9-5, to the world of the start-up.

What do start-ups look for?

Obviously every company is different but, if I were to sum it up in one word, I’d say ‘passion’.

If you were starting a company from scratch, spending (initially), 60+ hours a week with a handful of other people, uncertain if it will pay off, then you need to be confident about those other people. You need to know that they, like you, hunger for your idea to work and be successful. You need to know that they are 100% behind your idea. This doesn’t really change even when the company reaches 50+, sometimes even 100+ employees, especially when this growth can happen within a short number of years in a fast-growth start-up.

When I screen candidates for culture fit in start-up tech roles, passion is one of the key indicators for me. This is everything from what a candidate does in their spare time, to the way they talk about their work, and if their eyes light up.

Does a corporate background count against you?

No, not necessarily, but I would definitely look at what the candidate has been doing outside of work – side projects, meet-ups etc. By the way, by ‘corporate’ I don’t just mean a large company – I mean the traits that unfortunately tend to come along with being a larger company – technically set in its ways, very hierarchical, slow moving. 

I think it’s a much more natural move to transition from an SME, because the start-up world is dynamic, evolving constantly, and usually very flat structurally, but it depends entirely on the individual, and it’s never too late to make the change.

I’d say the key thing here is to make sure you’re coding in your spare time. Swot up and make sure you know all the latest trends in your chosen technology. The tech space moves fast and if your company isn’t sympathetic to that then you need to be.

Is joining a start-up risky and time consuming?     

It can be, but you just have to be smart about it. I think it’s quite easy to tell if a start-up has legs or not. Look at where the money is coming from; if they have a concrete business plan beyond big dreams; if they have done their market research and have a track record in the space; who the other people working there are and what their backgrounds are.

I think when you consider what recently happened to Tesco, it’s clear that any company can fail, big or small. It’s only as big a risk as your research is careless.

If you think you'd like to work for an awesome London start-up message me :) 

This is a Man's World? Sexism and Technology

I’ve been trying to write a post about women and technology for months but I always shied away from it. I was worried about approaching a topic which provokes so much debate and such strong feelings (and often aggression) without knowing enough to be able to protect and defend myself against potential backlash. Maybe that was cowardly.

I will not, I’m sure, say anything revolutionary here, but I feel it’s my duty as somebody who works (albeit not directly) in the technology sector, to weigh in on this issue.

Personally, I’m a feminist, because feminism is the belief that everyone should be treated with equal respect regardless of gender. On that basis, I would question anyone who is not a feminist. This said, I think many people associate feminism with pedantry and men-hating, or feel it’s outdated because equality has already been achieved and they do not personally experience a problem in their own life. Many people do not see the concept of feminism as the advocacy of equality. Ultimately the use of or definition of the word is not paramount, so long as, at root, everybody believes and acts upon the belief that we are all equal. This is, sadly, not the case.

It is true to say that here in Britain, here in London, there might perhaps seem less need for militant feminism than in other areas of the world. Sexism still prevails against both genders but, by and large, the effect it has is to hamper free choice, rather than to prevent it completely. The trouble is that, if you stop taking your antibiotics when you start to feel better, the infection comes back with double the force and, when it comes to gender bias, many areas of our society are still sick.

I approach this topic as somebody who didn’t originally consider herself a feminist. Most of my friends, male and female, were brought up to believe in equality and, as a girl, I never felt limited by my gender or that I could not achieve the same as or more than my male counterparts. The top three students across the board in my year at school were all girls throughout my school career. I went to a good University and got a degree, and I prioritised my career when I graduated without a thought to how later having a family might affect this, and without thinking that any hiring manager might think that it would.

I went straight into a recruitment company setting up a vertical in software development – and my perspective about women in the workplace began to change. When you don’t see problems in your own work or social environment it can be easy to dismiss allegations of gender inequality, but they’re worth spending some serious time thinking about. In technology there is still a serious problem.

This is nothing new, I’m sure, to anybody who works in technology, but some basic stats for those who don’t… Behind the commonly spoken of ‘White Brogrammer’ culture are surveys to quantify the lack of females in Tech. In May, Google published a report showing that 70% of their Global workforce was male, with other leading technology companies including Facebook publishing similar results. Transparency is important, and Google’s decision to launch a multimillion pound program to attract women is a commitment to desiring to address the imbalance, but it might be difficult when the root cause of the problem is still debated. The Guardian commented that, though commonly the low number of women in technology is attributed to the fact that fewer women take Science and Technology subjects at school, in actuality many women begin a career in programming and then leave, suggesting that there is also an issue with the cultural reception of them.

   

As a recruiter it becomes pretty obvious that women are a minority – I’ve spoken to a handful in 18 months (I’ll speak to 10-20 people a day). Female coders are known in the recruitment industry to be highly “placeable”, with tech companies struggling to address their diversity issues crying out for women’s CVs. I’ve had clients tell me off the record they’ll pay me a higher rate if I can find them a girl. I sometimes think that this positive discrimination is actually a desecration of feminism – treating men as less desirable candidates than women because they are male. Ideally you would not need to bias, of course, towards a gender. I wonder if this kind of positive bias is ever right? In any case, it is a problem caused by an attempt to fix an original problem.

But it does not do much good to hire women if their experience in your company is then negative and discouraging. One female developer (we’ll call her Charlotte) who I met with told me that she once tried an experiment on github, where she submitted a question under the name ‘Charlotte’ and then at a later point the same question under the name ‘Charlie’. The feedback she received from the tech community when they assumed she was a boy was supportive, constructive, and assumed a good level of competence, whereas some of the feedback she received when she posted as ’Charlotte’ was patronising or condescending. With minimal delving online you can find a huge number of accounts by women within the global tech community being made to feel deficient, unwelcome, or objectified by their male (and sometimes  even other female) counterparts – a few interesting ones are here, here and here.

I want to conclude this commentary but I’m not sure there’s a conclusion. This isn’t a problem with an easy solution or a clear end point. The stories of female coders often comment on the many respectful and fantastic male colleagues they have had, and in focussing on the problem perhaps I’ve neglected to point that out until now, but it should be said. #

The issue is that until a woman can attend a tech conference and not stick out like a sore thumb, until a woman can start a job as a programmer and not even dream that she might have to face limiting beliefs from her co-workers (male and female), then we should continue to have these conversations openly and not push them to the back of our minds.

Stay Ahead of the Curve

Thought I'd write a quick post about employee attraction and retention in Tech companies - meant to relate to technical hires (since this is what I know about!).

Common Reasons Technical Employees Leave Their Job...

* The company is directionless/failing/weak leadership
* The company does not care about technology and 'doing things right'
* The projects have become repetitive and boring
* The employee is not getting the chance to use a technology they love
* The employee sees no progression potential and feels unrecognised
* Logistical issues - money/location/commute

How Can You Counter These?

* Business Plan

This both relates to you wider business, and the employees' career path within it. 

If you're a start-up, you need to have a clear business plan which is founded on facts and research rather than just enthusiasm and passion. Whilst start-ups are always risky, you will significantly minimise the risk for prospective employees if you can prove your idea has legs and you're taking it in the right direction. You need to have an idea of where funding is coming from and be honest with your staff about this. 

If you're an established company business plan is as, if not more, important. You can't rest on your laurels, and must demonstrate how you intend to keep your offering fresh in the face of competition. Increasingly, start-ups will spring up to fill the gaps in your business model so, the more you grow, the more you need to demonstrate you're constantly improving your business model and remain receptive to industry changes. Companies whose business models do not change to reflect the trends in technology (for example, those who remain driven by Waterfall workflows and can't become agile) will find it very difficult to attract top talent.


* Technology

Where possible, take risks with interesting and new technologies in order to make sure you're always using what is most relevant and efficient. This is obviously easier for smaller companies than for large ones with established platforms but, saying that, I have clients with teams of over 60 developers who are experimenting with a variety of new technologies and in some cases totally rebuilding their platforms to better cater to market demand. Obviously this is also dependent on your budget and agenda, but one of the best ways to attract top talent is to demonstrate you are heavily investing in new technology.

Top developers want to work for companies where coding standards are a priority and where they can continue to improve themselves and innovate.

It isn't always possible or desirable to move away from your current platform, but successful tech companies engender a community around their brand and innovate outside of their day-to-day work. You could encourage employees to work on their own projects every Friday afternoon, or collect suggestions for an experimental project that the whole team will then vote on and build together. Even if you're unable to innovate on your current stack, encourage innovation.


* Listening and Responding

In the best companies, process is not more important than people. 

Process has its place, but attracting good people will yield far more in the long-run. Listen to everybody in your business and encourage them to voice ideas - create a democratic, meritocratic environment, not a dictatorship.

Hire strong Technical Leadership, and listen to them. Encourage pay reviews that are suggested by the employees, not the manager. I see so many times people who leave because they feel undervalued and underpaid, and this is such an avoidable problem.

You should build your business around your talent, not the other way around.

Message me if you want to chat more about anything I've written! 
I'm on charlotte.poynton@lafosse.com (for my work) and char.poynton@gmail.com for anything else :)        

Two Point Guide to CV Writing

**Please, please, for the love of God, do not put everything in boxes**

It was only a matter of time until this post was written.. I know there's a lot of these out there, but I think I might as well add my two pennies' worth! I see a huge number of poorly structured and written CVs so this is still a problem worth addressing.

I know the market is evolving, and for a lot of developers you'll use code samples, github, stackoverflow, network to find a new job. However, for many people - whether because they're further down the career ladder, or new to the London market - CV writing is still a key part of the application process.

Though some things are a matter of preference, but I would say follow these basic principles and your CV will stand out to recruiters who know nothing about technology as well as technical employers.

1. Make sure the tone is Achievement Led

• Include a section near the start with Key Achievements. These should be the top 2-3 things you're most proud of. If you're starting out, pick side projects or work experience challenges.
• Broadly speaking, the STAR approach works at any level (Situation (setting/context), Task (what you were asked to do personally), Approach (what you did, and any challenges you had to overcome), Result (achievement - did you deliver in time, in budget, and what did that mean for your team and company?).
• Make sure you don't lose your personality when you do this - there is no substitution for simple passion. I come across CVs with bios like 'I have been programming since I was 13, and it is my life', and I still love reading them. I know sometimes that kind of thing might sound a little trite, but it actually normally reads as very genuine, because it is. A combination of personality and achievements is a winner.
• I would count good spelling and grammar as part of this tone you're trying to set. Spell check your text, get someone else to read it. I've rejected CVs for not doing so and have seen many employers do so as well.

2. Remember to KISS (keep it simple, stupid)

• I would recommend the following sections and this is my preference of order:
• Name, contact details > Short Profile (a few sentences) summarising your career history and objective for next role > Key Achievements > Technical Skills (technologies you've used and level you're at) > Professional Experience > Training/Education/Qualifications > Hobbies (anything relevant to your career path is highly relevant to put here). Only exception I'd say is with fresh graduates, where I would put 'Education' straight under 'Profile'.   
• For Professional Experience, use the STAR approach (above) and outline specific things you did, not your team, though frame your achievements in the context of the wider project and say how it impacted the business. Outline briefly 3-5 key projects/tasks you undertook in the role.
• If written efficiently, your CV should really not go over 2-3 pages, regardless of level. You only need go into detail for your last three most relevant roles. If you have relevant experience from years back, highlight it in your Key Achievements section.
• Formatting - a professional looking font (calibri, TNR, arial etc), size 10-12, and **please, please for the love of God, do not put everything in boxes**. Recruiters will send your profile with a couple of others, and will make sure they are all formatted to look the same. This is just professionalism, and we will always talk through your individual suitability in detail over the phone. You will save us both a lot of time if you just keep the formatting simple. If you want to show your design skills, include a link to your portfolio, or have two versions of your CV at the ready.

Any questions or additions would love to hear them, as always!