Building a successful company today means more than just moving fast, breaking things, and gobbling up market share. Success is increasingly dependent on hiring the right engineers and making sure to create an environment where they are motivated to contribute and thrive.

This means recognizing that companies must be attuned to managing a host of factors in any corporate workplace, so the good days for any one employee outnumber the bad.

“A bad day for an engineer is a day when something is breaking and they have to stay up all night and fix it,” said Christine Heckart (pictured, left), chief executive officer of Scalyr Inc. “A good day for an engineer, a human being, is the day they get to go home and have dinner with the family.”

Heckart spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in Palo Alto, California. She was joined by Bhawna Singh (pictured, center), vice president of engineering at Glassdoor Inc., and JP Krishnamoorthy (pictured, right), senior vice president of engineering at Coupa Software Inc. They discussed the importance of managing technical debt, expansion of the engineering community beyond company walls, creating peer learning opportunities, coordination of work as firms expand into remote locations, and the need to address diversity issues in the workplace (see the full interview with transcript here).

Speed leads to problems

One of the factors that can lead to a lot of bad days is technical debt, also known as code debt. It’s what happens when development teams deliver a certain functionality in the interest of speed, but then have to go back and rework the code because of problems later.

As a management variable, technical debt is often an inescapable issue for most companies. It is also an issue even with major open-source tools, such as Kubernetes. Despite the popularity of the container orchestration tool, users have been wrestling with issues around Kubernetes authentication management that involves connections between pods and the Kubernetes API server.

“The dark side is technical debt,” Krishnamoorthy said. “How do you move fast, but at the same time how do you not slow yourself down in the future? If you’re trying to capture a market or prove out an idea, it becomes the fundamental thesis for getting things out there quickly.”

The Kubernetes example illustrates the increasing role that community now plays in driving the engineering mindset and ecosystem. Thanks to the growth of open-source, engineers can contribute their talents far beyond the scope of the companies that employ them.

This has not only enriched the career field, but has also created a significant accelerator for innovation. As described recently by an analyst from IDC Research Inc., the role of engineering communities has dramatically sped up code and application deployment.

“What engineers also love is giving back to the community,” Singh said. “Companies are not just tech communities of engineering teams. We have a bigger engineering community now: the whole tech world.”

Peer networking and transparency

Scalyr, a server log-monitoring tools provider, has a strong engineering focus. Its products are designed to help other engineers rapidly debug software in complex stacks.

While there were resources for senior executives and marketing staff to network with peers, a similar opportunity did not exist for engineers. So, Scalyr started an engineering peer network to facilitate broader educational exposure within the technology community.

“It’s about more than just training them,” Heckart explained. “It’s about giving them context and full social skills, giving them places where they can learn not just from the other engineers in their company, but from engineers across the industry at their same level. We’re a company by engineers for engineers.”

While Scalyr has a strong engineering culture, Glassdoor maintains a significant commitment to organizational transparency, according to Singh. The company provides recruiting solutions as well as reviews and insights into companies. It is mindful of a need for openness with its own staff about the firm and its progress.

This commitment to transparency is also demonstrated in hiring where multiple groups are often involved. “Recruiting is where the whole company comes together,” Singh said. “When someone is hired, they need to see that within the company we are transparent. We share a lot of data, a lot of information, good and bad, with every single person in the company.”

Glassdoor experienced significant growth following the launch of its public beta in 2008. The company announced in July it would further expand its presence in Chicago, with plans to create up to 500 new jobs.

The challenge for Glassdoor is to maintain its cultural focus as it grows. “You really need strong, good, really trusted leaders in the locations to inculcate a bigger team,” Singh said. “When we seeded our new remote location with a few people from the original, that helped start the similar aspects of what Glassdoor stands for, our core ethos and values. That helped us in a big way.”

Unity in action

Remote management of engineering teams remains a key requirement for many companies. Coupa Software has seen demand for its business spend management platform rise following two consecutive years of 40% revenue growth, as it has expanded operations globally.

For Coupa’s Krishnamoorthy, remote management of engineers in his organization must allow for willingness to challenge assumptions and express ideas, while following the course that the company ultimately sets.

“It’s an age-old saying, ‘diversity in thought, unity in action.’ You need to have the right technical leaders on both sides and be willing to collaborate with each other,” Krishnamoorthy said.

As top leaders manage the challenges of maintaining a strong culture and effective cross-organizational collaboration, they must also confront a thorny issue within the tech world at large: diversity.

On a visit to his development center in India, Krishnamoorthy took a picture of his entire management team and brought it back to show to fellow executives. Not a single person in the picture was female.

“It’s crazy,” Krishnamoorthy said. “It’s not like we are not trying.”

At Glassdoor, the firm’s research team analyzed the issue of gender pay gap, according to Singh. “They did a study, and they shared a projection of when we will close the gender pay gap. It’s 2070. That’s depressing,” Singh concluded, acknowledging the challenges ahead.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE