2 posts tagged with "culture"

A public company we'll call Company X hit its 2023 engineering DEI target: 28% women in engineering, up from 21%. Two years later, the number was back to 22%. Hiring kept working; retention didn't. The post-mortem found three patterns the original program missed: under-promotion of women with 2-4 years tenure, above-average code-review rejection rates for under-represented minorities, and assignment bias toward "glue work" that doesn't count for promotion.

Most engineering DEI programs stop measuring at the top of the funnel. Hiring numbers are public, easy to collect, and lend themselves to targets. What happens after someone joins — the promotion rate, the review cycle, the assignment pattern — is where culture actually lives. And it's where programs succeed or fail quietly, often without management noticing until the exit interviews pile up.

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey consistently shows that developer autonomy and trust are among the strongest predictors of job satisfaction — yet most metrics implementations ignore this entirely. On one side, leaders who want to understand and improve their teams' performance. On the other, developers who hear "we're implementing metrics" and immediately think "Big Brother." Both sides have valid concerns. The question isn't whether to measure — it's how to measure without destroying the culture you're trying to improve.