Most of the distinguishing features of a successful engineering organization involve decisions about how non-engineers are hired, managed, and interact with engineering teams

Yeah sure sure hire the best engineers you can

But if you’re not also building a great product team, a design practice, TPM, legal, workplace ops

You’re, uh, gonna have some problems

And hire engineers who, when they run into a problem with Legal, start talking to the legal team to understand the underlying requirements and the legal team’s needs as humans and employees, and start working with legal to continuously improve their shared systems

If you happen to buy an engineering organization and then start chopping up its workplace ops, HR, licensing, release, and other personnel and processes

Pretty fast, you are not going to have the engineering organization you bought, or it’s abilities

Workplace ops, HR, legal, etc. are all a part of the system that produces software