How to keep your tech team happy

Team productivity is a very important topic, and usually is neglected by organizations. Typically, surveys should be in place at least quarterly to collect feedback. This should be mapped into actions that will lead to improvements.

In general the following items should be always be cared for:

• Tooling, in terms of hardware and software services for the engineering team eg. Github copilot, IDEs for specific languages that increase productivity.
• Transparency (in the form of documentation), information regarding the system and services should be available. This will allow engineers to end up in dead-ends and reduce overall dependencies.
• Regular all-hands, people should always know what we are trying to achieve, why tasks are important. This can also be a feedback channel to early detect bottlenecks and remove them.
• Strict technology stack, without being completely against it, polyglotism should be avoided and at the same the right tool should be used for the right context eg. it would be suicidal not to use Python on AI/ML teams. For example, in my current role, the magic number is five (5); Golang (Backend), Python (Data science and Backend), Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android), Javascript/Typescript (web) and we are sunsetting PHP and NodeJS (Javascript) for backend services.

There should be also squads of engineers that are focusing on creating tools for the tech teams, eg. AI agents that will have the internal knowledge of the APIs and you can ask them questions, instead of searching in OpenAPI specifications.

Epilogue

The truth is that the happier one engineer is, the more productive it is. The above list of items are focusing mainly to unblocking the engineers in their day-to-day work. From my experience, engineers are first-of-all frustrated when they are blocked and cannot do their work. The second most popular reason is meetings :).