Where to get more information about the culture of different software teams?

October 15, 2011 8:53 PM

This insider perspective on the management culture at Google and Amazon by Steve Yegge is absolutely fascinating and educational. Where else can I get information like this on the culture of various software organizations?

I'm a software manager so this stuff is like gold to me. I'm mainly interested in how other groups manage engineering teams and software products specifically. Personal blogs, magazine articles, books, etc - anything that sheds some insight into what makes software groups work well and not so well would be great.

posted by unmodern to Human Relations (7 answers total)

Not sure if this is exaclty what you want but here is one for not so well: The Daily WTF.
posted by pyro979 at 9:00 PM on October 15, 2011

Well, Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror sometimes deals with team and product development topics. Fairly closely related is Joel on Software, as they both collaborated on the Stack Exchange platform. Then there's Paul Graham, who runs the YCombinator startup incubator, and has some essays on the topic Yahoo.
posted by jraenar at 9:18 PM on October 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The Hacker News thread on Yegge’s post is worth reading. In the thread, a number of current and former Amazon programmers talk about what it’s like to work there. Though Amazon has great customer service, its internal culture seems really horrible.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 10:28 PM on October 15, 2011

Best answer: A sizeable number of Microsoft employees write blogs, but divining the dirt on management culture from the sanctioned stuff on blogs.msdn.com can be like reading tea leaves. Look instead to the internal dissent on Mini-Microsoft where engineers vent and much inside-baseball chatter is dished out. Mini-MS has scaled back a lot in the last couple of years, but go back a ways and you'll find what you're looking for. It is widely believed that Microsoft management reads the blog, and have made changes (mostly for the better) based on it.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:53 AM on October 16, 2011

Steve Yegge's post on G+ was meant for an internal system, but there are a lot of high-profile Googlers active on G+ and many of them talk about various aspects of the company. Natalie Villalobos, community manager for G+, shared a big circle of them here.
posted by ahzee at 2:37 AM on October 16, 2011

Folklore.org is a treasure trove of early Apple inside-baseball stuff, including a lot of the early software.
posted by GilloD at 8:54 AM on October 16, 2011

Best answer: This series of questions on Quora about the internal culture of tech companies is quite informative:

What is the internal culture like at Apple?
What's the internal culture of Facebook like?
What's the internal culture of Mozilla like?
What's the internal culture of Twitter like?
What is the internal culture like at Amazon?
posted by remixnine at 5:48 PM on October 16, 2011 [1 favorite]