As Medium turns the page on becoming a profitable company, in engineering we are looking ahead at how that milestone changes the way we think about the work we do and how we want to approach it going…

Medium Engineering is a publication on Medium.com that provides insights, best practices, and technical articles from Medium's engineering team. Covering topics such as software architecture, backend development, and infrastructure management, Medium Engineering offers  insights into the engineering practices and technologies used at Medium. Developers can learn about Medium's engineering culture, technology stack, and software development processes, and gain insights from Medium's experiences in building and scaling a popular content platform.

Medium Engineering

Medium's engineering team is embarking on a new era focused on long-term stability and success. Previous efforts were geared towards rapid improvement, but now the emphasis is on sustaining excellence and building a robust future. Key principles include prioritizing correctness, owning the 'how' in projects, adhering to processes, maintaining focus, and innovating uniquely. This transition aims to foster a world-class engineering culture that supports Medium's growth into a dependable multi-billion dollar company.

A New Era of Medium Engineering

Not trying to be mean or edgy, but to me this is some superficial BS talk. Nothing in this letter to the team is remarkable (or even actionable). I even find that the leadership here is coping out of their responsibility to drive the culture:
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It’s easy to read this list and say “yeah… I think we’re mostly trying to do this”. I don’t think that is the case. If we embrace this properly, the expectations and the way we work should change meaningfully.
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This is the “it’s all up to us” method, instead of leadership taking ownership and saying “we drive this because we believe it”. If this fails, it’s not the leadership that will usually take the hit in such scenarios because it is this wishy-washy shared responsibility of everyone.
You want better processes, better research, clear communication to stakeholders, and people should focus on few projects at the time? That’s not up to the “little guy”, that’s the job of the leadership to establish and enforce it.

Internet publishing is feudalism 2.0, where the creators do free work and get paid if they pay taxes to the overlords.