by Gary Worthington, More Than Monkeys

You’ve probably heard the boiling frog metaphor. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it jumps straight out because it notices the danger immediately. But if you place it in cold water and slowly raise the heat, it won’t notice until it’s too late.

This isn’t just a cautionary tale about frogs. It’s a perfect analogy for what happens to engineering culture when teams stop paying attention.

And I hope it goes without saying, don’t actually boil frogs. Its a bloody metaphor!

Culture Doesn’t Collapse All at Once

When an engineering culture goes bad, it rarely happens overnight. It’s gradual. And that’s what makes it dangerous.

• A team skips a retro because everyone’s too busy.
• A post-mortem is replaced with “we’ll just fix it quickly.”
• A new hire asks a question and gets silence.
• A rushed deadline leads to skipped tests “just this once.”
• People start talking about how things “used to be better”, but no one pushes to fix it.

No individual moment feels like a crisis. But each is a degree of heat added to the pan.

The real danger is that these small cultural compromises become the new baseline. People stop noticing the water getting warmer. When habits of quality, trust, and shared ownership degrade gradually, it’s easy to rationalise: “It’s just a blip,” “We’re under pressure,” or “It’s temporary.” But without intervention, these behaviours calcify into culture.

What It Looks Like When the Water’s Boiling

If you’ve worked in a team that’s already hit this point, you’ll recognise the signs:

• Good engineers go quiet or leave.
• Junior developers have no clear path to growth.
• Delivery becomes reactive, not strategic.
• Product and engineering are misaligned.
• Leadership starts enforcing process instead of enabling good practice.
• Pull requests sit untouched for days, or are rubber-stamped without meaningful review.
• Teams avoid tackling technical debt because “we’ll never get time for it.”
• Knowledge silos form and nobody actively works to break them.
• Engineers feel like ticket-takers, not problem-solvers.
• Conversations about quality, usability, or maintainability get dismissed as “not urgent right now.”
• Fingers get pointed

Morale drops, delivery slows, and trust fractures - both within the team and with stakeholders. Engineering becomes a service function, not a partner. You see work being done, but not much progress being made.

And by the time these symptoms show up, fixing the culture isn’t a matter of tweaking Jira or adding a team lunch. You need a deliberate, strategic reset.

How to Turn Down the Heat

Stopping the slow boil requires awareness and consistent intervention. Here are a few ways to start turning things around:

1. Bring Back the Feedback Loops

Retrospectives, post-mortems, regular 1:1s. These aren’t ceremonies, they’re your early-warning system. When they’re working, they help surface friction before it festers. If they’ve become mechanical or disappeared entirely, bring them back and make them useful again. That means listening without defensiveness and acting on what’s heard.

2. Protect Engineering Standards

If testing, peer review, or CI have slipped, don’t wait for a massive outage to correct it. Reinforce what good looks like. That doesn’t mean obsessing over 100% test coverage; it means making quality a habit, not a hurdle. Give engineers time and space to improve tooling and refine shared practices.

3. Make It Safe to Ask Questions

Psychological safety isn’t a buzzword; it’s a prerequisite for a healthy engineering culture. If people don’t feel safe raising concerns, you won’t know what’s broken until it’s too late. Encourage questions like “Why are we doing it this way?” or “What would happen if we tried something else?” Then actually respond to them with curiosity, not defensiveness.

4. Reconnect Engineering With Product

If your engineers are only hearing about deadlines, not outcomes, the water’s already getting hot. Get them back into discovery conversations. Let them hear directly from users or sit in on product reviews. Engineers build better systems when they understand the problem, not just the spec.

5. Re-onboard the Team

Sometimes you need to press pause and re-align around purpose, values, and working agreements. That might mean a team health check, a working agreement reset, or a few focused workshops to re-establish expectations. Culture isn’t just what you believe, it’s what you practice every day. Make sure everyone’s on the same page about what that looks like.

Final Thoughts

You don’t fix a broken culture by hiring a few new people or adopting a new tool. You fix it by noticing when the temperature starts to rise and choosing to act early.

Healthy engineering cultures aren’t built on slogans or frameworks. They’re maintained through small, intentional behaviours; giving feedback, holding the line on quality, being transparent about tradeoffs, and aligning purpose with delivery.

Because once the water is boiling, it’s already too late.