Our engineering team is quickly growing in numbers. Whilst we do try to keep a relatively flat hierarchy, we are split into teams of between 4 to 7 developers. At any given time, each team has a specific focus on one area of the application, although we do our best to make sure one team doesn't always get the same work, allowing us to spread knowledge about the entire app between our engineering team.

When we had 5 developers working back to back and all going for tea breaks at the same time, we didn't need our engineering values written down — it was just how we worked. As the team has grown to multiples of that, we can't rely on that shared understanding just happening by itself any more. So, we've distilled the things that we think make engineering at Gearset what it is. We hope it will help existing team members to know how to make decisions and prioritise work, and help new starters know what to expect and how we work. We also hope it helps keep us accountable to our own high standards!

These values will never be perfect. As with all of the process, rules, and principles that we follow at Gearset, these values are things that we use as guiding principles in the general case, but they're not dogma. We attempt to be pragmatic in all that we do, and that means sometimes, if it benefits us, we will temporarily break from these guidelines. We should also be open to changing them if our values change — what works for 25 engineers might not work for 100 (or 500!)

Like our company values and mentoring guide, we want to open up our engineering values to the world. If they're good enough to hold ourselves to then they're good enough to share.

Our values can be split roughly into three categories:

We make constant, incremental progress:

We know our priorities (and their order)
We release good now, rather than perfect next week
We take ownership
We reject process for the sake of process

We work together:

We fight silos
Consistency is good
We're constructive
We don't point fingers (ship happens)

We solve problems, thoroughly and thoughtfully:

We understand the problem before we try to solve it
We treat causes not symptoms
We identify the compromises that we're making