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Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

My org has an Engineering Guild that I am a "leader" of [in the sense that I just organize calendars and "officiate" the call, it's completely flat otherwise]-the guild itself doesn't make up the company, but rather just exists as a small little "coven" within the larger enterprise, there's about 12 of us, though we don't publish anything out publicly for other teams to emulate. Probably not a bad idea now that you bring it up. We've written code for things that went to local non-profits, and written code that became a fully-funded line of business for the company as a service offering (but wasn't-at the time-part of any scoped or planned work, just an idea one of our SREs had to improve an existing business product, built it, deployed it, showed it to the executives).

What would you like to know?

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Fascinating, thanks for sharing!

I have a few questions:

-How does your team get motivated and compensated?

-Is there a code of conduct?

-How do you decide what to build?

- How does someone join the Engineering Guild?

This is fascinating!

What line of business is your company in? Who is your guild accountable to? What metrics are you measured by?

Public health accounting/medical billing software. Right now we are "sponsored" by the CTO, but he's quite hands off and leaves us a lot of autonomy. Our charter is heavily influenced by the scientific method and intense, rigorous study, which is paradoxically not as regimented in the business-level work we do because ever changing priorities and customer influenced decision making by our project managers and enterprise leaders.

The guild, not beholden to the enterprise itself we are INFINITELY better about scope creep and velocity for the projects originating from and ultimately brought into maturity by us-without that outside influence of the rest of the business.

Metrics was actually the topic of our most recent congregation, looking into new and creative ways of establishing both performance and delivery metrics aligned with the DevOps way for our own "pet projects" as a guild, which we (hope) translate back up and into what we do for the day-to-day business objectives. So none. Yet :)

Please write some more about this, I think it would be very interesting to hear more about how you are still able to provide value to the business while being able to push back on scope creep and velocity. Does the guild encompass all of the programmers in the company?

Not all are members presently, but all are certainly welcome. It's a completely voluntary join. Right now I'd say we have mostly long-tenured programmers and two guys from our DevOps team and a young fella from UI.

I'll bring it up in our next congregation and see about getting some of the writers in the group together and collaborate with our marketing team about maybe publishing a blog series.

What is the difference between this and “labs” set up by companies?

The name, I suppose.

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