Principles of Engineering Culture at Wealthfront
Wealthfront is a technology company. We believe software is the key to building products that help our clients build wealth, and our relationship with technology directly determines how good we are at building this software. When engineers onboard at Wealthfront, we give them this document, our Principles of Engineering Culture. These principles describe Wealthfront’s relationship with technology and the way we as engineers fulfill our goals during our time at Wealthfront.
We didn’t choose these principles arbitrarily: they are based on experience and reason. They do not describe the way things accidentally are but describe the way we intentionally made our culture to be. Our engineering culture directly influences the company’s relationship with technology and therefore the type of company we’re building. As a result, these principles have not changed much since our early days.
New products and problems are often brought to engineering teams to solve, but then technical leadership of these teams interweave these priorities with necessary infrastructure as part of their platforms’ continued advancement in engineering quality. While it is the team’s job to propose and defend these improvements, it is then management’s job to internally align and clear the path for the improvements to happen. The alternative would be for management to command infrastructure projects that teams then find time to execute. Such management decrees are avoided as they lead to poor trade-offs and unhappy teams.
