Joo Lee

In an earlier post, we shared how we think about Engineering Values at Endowus and how they guide our decision making. In this post, we will share some instances where we applied these values in real scenarios. By the way, we also covered this topic in a talk titled “From Theory to Practice: How Engineering Values Inform Technology Decisions,” at APIdays Singapore 2023. The complete talk can be viewed on YouTube.

There have been many attempts at defining the culture of an organisation. Some claim culture stems from a company’s vision and mission. Others think it’s about perks and benefits. We think the best articulation of what constitutes a company’s culture is found in Ben Horowitz’s book “What You Do Is Who You Are”, in which he writes: Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you are not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. This rubric of decision making can be captured as that which a company values. As individual contributors, and later as engineering leaders at many different companies, we’ve witnessed first-hand how engineering teams make choices and decisions that are influenced by these cultural values. Every company, every department, and every team has values. Whether they realise it or not and whether they explicitly write them down or not - they exist and are the invisible force guiding employee behaviours and decision making.