A Ping Pong Table is Not Your Culture
A Ping Pong Table is not your culture.
Free food is not your culture.
Giving team members Macbook Pros is not your culture.
Free yoga classes are not your culture.
Free Jawbones, iPods, and tablets are not culture.
Culture is a reflection of what you reward and punish. Culture is your values. It is how you enable your team to be succesful, how you rally around your mission.
Good cultures punish drama. Good cultures give people the tools they need to do their jobs. Good cultures communicate openly and support the whole person. Good cultures support work-life integration. Good cultures dogfood their product. Good cultures are product driven and customer focused.
Good engineering cultures uses source control. Good engineering cultures can make a build quickly and do make builds daily. Good engineering cultures don’t let bugs fester in backlogs, have a spec for new features, and have sprint cycles.