The Engineers' Manifesto

Easy to understand, hard to emulate

At my first job there was once a discussion about the best practices and principles all developers on the team should follow. One of our senior engineers wrote this short “manifesto” on a whim that I’ve copy-pasted verbatim below, in case this is of use to anyone else out there.

This is the engineers’ manifesto, applicable to things beyond engineering as well.

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• Be ethical

  • Your hands are on the keyboard, not your manager’s

• People first

  • Code is written first for people to use (users), and also for other people to read (fellow devs or you in the future)

  • Processes are created for people. Processes should fit people not the other way around

• Quality is non-negotiable

  • Negotiate scope, negotiate time, negotiate resources, do not negotiate quality

• Invest in yourself

  • Hone your craft and learn your tools

  • Don’t do work you don’t understand

  • Understand both how to do it from a technical perspective, but more importantly understand what value it provides to the world

  • If you are not moving forwards, you’re going backwards

• Embrace failure

  • Fail fast and learn from it

  • Iterate

• Respect your teammates

  • Respect their time. Be present. Participate

  • Embrace asynchronous collaboration

  • Be humble

  • Teach through code reviews, learn from code reviews

• Happy developers are productive developers

  • Take time off

  • Find meaning in your work

Fin.