IAmA

PROOF: https://i.redd.it/vzoj3bda5hx91.jpg

Hi again Reddit! Our last engineering AMA was super fun and I’m back for more. I’m joined today by our Senior Engineering Manager, Ylan Salsbury (/u/BNG-ylan).

Last year I took on a new role here – Head of Engineering. One of my responsibilities is defining What Good Looks Like for engineering at Bungie. Historically we’ve conveyed that mostly by example, implicitly handing down culture to new hires one interaction at a time. That worked ok because of our moderate size, very long average tenure, and heavy in-person collaboration. However, with our commitment to digital-first and continuing rapid growth (125->175 engineers over the last 2 years and many open roles!), we needed a better way.

So we built a Values Handbook and recently published it on our Tech Blog. It’s not short or punchy. It’s not slogans or buzzwords. It’s not even particularly technical – with the tremendous diversity of our tech challenges, there are very few tech principles that apply across the whole of Bungie. We don’t think the magic of how we engineer is found in brilliant top-down technical guidance - we hire excellent engineers and we empower them to make their own tech decisions as much as possible. No, we think the magic of our engineering is in how we work together in ways that build trust, generate opportunities, and make Bungie a joyful and satisfying place to be for decades.

So yea, we're curious to hear what you think of our Values Handbook and what questions it makes you think of. Also happy to answer other questions. Just like last AMA, I want to shout out to friends from r/destinythegame with a reminder that Ylan and I aren’t the right folks to answer questions about current game design hot topics or future Destiny releases, so you can expect us to dodge those. Other than that, please AMA! We'll be answering as many questions as we can from at least 2-4pm pacific.

4PM UPDATE: Ylan and I are getting pulled into other meetings, but we'll try to answer what we can as we have time. Thanks everyone for the great questions, and thanks to a bunch of other Bungie folks for helping with answers, we got to way more than I thought we would! This was fun, let's do it again sometime. <3