IndeedEng Culture: Be Ambitious, Stay Humble

In my previous posts on Indeed’s engineering culture, I wrote about keeping teams independent, making better mistakes, dealing with consolidation debt, encouraging autonomy and initiative, and the importance of not stack ranking individuals. These are my closing thoughts on how we work here at Indeed.

Perhaps one of Indeed’s traits that has struck me the most is how individuals, including top engineers and managers, have stayed humble, although they have built this company from the ground up. Bragging and boasting are not behaviors I have seen at Indeed. As I met my colleagues, it seems like being right or wrong is overrated. Instead, we are all focused on doing the right thing. I was surprised how veterans had time and patience. At first I wondered what I did to deserve it. They were curious to hear my perspectives although I had not demonstrated anything yet.

It took me some time to understand why. Then I figured it out. Being data-driven and expecting initiative means there is always a practical and immediate way to settle a burning argument. If you really believe that feature X is what the business needs, you don’t need to convince an army of managers and directors. You don’t need to be resentful for failing to do so, or not even trying. Your credentials (almost) do not matter. The only thing you need to do is to design the experiment that will prove or disprove your theory, and ship it. And if you are not doing so, why are you talking?


Editor’s note: This post concludes our 5-year anniversary series highlighting some of the most important aspects of Indeed’s engineering culture. We want to thank James Dingle for sharing his perspective and reminding us why we love coming to work here every day. Want to join us? Learn more at http://indeed.jobs.


IndeedEng Culture: Be Ambitious, Stay Humble cross-posted on Medium.