Will Larson's Blog, page 10

Predictability.

Right now I’m reading Michael S. Malone’s The Big Score, and one thing that I love about it is how much it believes that key individuals drive and create industries. It’s an infectious belief, and a necessary one to write a concise, coherent narrative story about the origins of Silicon Valley. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot as well in my career, and also while writing on my upcoming book on operating as an engineering executive–how much do good executives really matter?

My ego’s too fra...

2023 in review.

Previously: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

This was an eventful year. My son went to preschool,I joined Carta, left Calm, and wrote my third book.It was also a logistically intensive year, with our toddler heading to preschool,more work travel, and a bunch of other little bits and pieces.Here is my year in review summary.

I love to read other folks year-in writeups – if you write one, please send it my way!

Goals

Evaluating my goals for the year:

[Completed] Write at least four good bl...

Notes on How Big Things Get Done

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner is a fascinating look at why some megaprojects fail so resoundingly and why others succeed under budget and under schedule. It’s an exploration of planning methods, the role of expertise, the value of benchmarking similar projects, and much more. Not directly software engineering related, but very relevant to the work. Also, just well written.

“Think slow, act fast”

It’s fine for planning to be slow (p17), as long as delivery is fast.Eac...

Writers who operate.

Occasionally folks tell me that I should “write full time.” I’ve thought about this a lot, and have rejected that option because I believe that writers who operate (e.g. write concurrently with holding a non-writing industry role) are best positioned to keep writing valuable work that advances the industry.This is a lightly controversial view, so I wanted to pull together my full set of thoughts on the topic.

The themes I want to work through are:

Evaluating believability for operators is much...

Advancing the industry.

Early in my career, I navigated most decisions by simple hill climbing: if it was a more prestigious opportunity and paid more, I took it. As I got further, and my personal obligations grew, I started to think about navigating a 40-year career, where a given job might value pace rather than prestige. Over the last few years, what I’ve come to appreciate is that there’s another phase: purpose.

Purpose isn’t intrinsically the third phase of a career, but it certainly has been for me, as I was fixa...

Notes on Enterprise Architecture as Strategy

Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C Robertson is an interesting read on how integrating technology across business units shifts the company’sstrategy landscape. Written in 2006, case studies are not particularly current but the ideas remains relevant.

The technology industry is simultaneously grasped by the optimism that things are changing constantly–your skills from last year are already out of date!–andthe worry that nothing particularly important...

Create technical leverage: workflow improvements & product capabilities

More than a decade ago, I typed up a few paragraphs of notes, titled it “Building Technical Leverage,” and proceeded to forget about it. Those notes were from a meeting with Kevin Scott, then SVP Engineering at LinkedIn, while we wandered the Valley trying to convince potential acquirers to buy Digg. It was only this morning that I remembered that the post exists when I started trying to title this post on the same topic.

A decade later, I have accumulated more thoughts on the matter. Starting w...

Navigators

In Staff Engineer’s chapter on Managing Technical Quality, one of the very last suggestions is creating a centralized process to curate technical changes:

Curate technology change using architecture reviews, investment strategies, and a structured process for adopting new tools. Most misalignment comes from missing context, and these are the organizational leverage points to inject context into decision-making. Many organizations start here, but it’s the last box of tools that I recommend openi...

Notes on The Crux

The Crux by Richard Rumelt is a fantastic follow on to his Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, providing many of the same core ideas but in a more readable format, and a clearer target to take down: the incoherent outputs of process and goal-driven strategy.

Recently, I’ve been looking for more strategy books to read, andfolks pointed out that I’d missed a new book from Richard Rumelt,The Crux.No book has influenced my thinking about strategy more than Rumelt’s previous work,Good Strategy, Bad Str...

Engineering strategy notes.

Recently, I am thinking quite a bit about engineering strategy,and as part of that have started re-reading previous resourceson the topic, and looking for new things to read while I refinemy point of view on what makes for good engineering strategy.

The best introduction to my current theory of engineering strategy isSolving the Engineering Strategy Crisis,which has both written and video versions.You can also reading my other strategy writing via the strategy tag.

Let me know what I’m mi...