Will Larson's Blog, page 12

Video of Solving the Eng Strategy crisis.

A few weeks ago, I shared my script for my latest talk,Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis,which I gave at QCon last week.They’ll have the conference video up in a few weeks, but I also decided to do a recordingof the final version (albeit a few weeks after the talk, so definitely a bit less practicedthan the live edition).

You can watch that video on YouTube.

As mentioned, I don’t think I was quite as practiced in this was as ideal,but would have probably never have gotten it done if...

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis.

These are speaking notes for my October 4th, QCon talk in San Francisco.
Slides for this talk.

Over the course of my career, I’ve frequently heard from colleagues, team membersand random internet strangers with the same frustration: the company doesn’t havean Engineering strategy.I don’t think this problem is unique to Engineering: it’s also common to hearfolks complain that they’re missing a strategy for Product, Design or Business.But, whereas I don’t feel particularly confident speaking ...

Drafted Eng Executive's Primer!

Back in late April, I mentioned that I wasworking on a new book,The Engineering Executive’s Primer,with O’Reilly.I wanted to share a few notes on progress!

First, there’s a cover, shown above in this post’s image, and also in the right rail (or bottom footer if you’rereading on a smaller device). I’m quite excited about the cover, which is simple and imperfect. There is nothingpure about being an executive, it’s mostly about balancing opposing forces to the best of your ability,and I thin...

Performance & Compensation (for Eng Execs).

Uber’s original performance process was called “T3B3” and was remarkably simple: write the individuals top 3 strengths, and top 3 weaknesses, and share the feedback with them directly in person. There was a prolonged fight against even documenting the feedback, which was viewed as discouraging honesty. On the other side of things, there are numerous stories of spending months crafting Google promotion packets that still don’t get their authors promoted. Among those who’ve worked within both Uber...

The Engineering executive’s role in hiring.

Everyone in an engineering organization contributes to the hiring process. As an engineer, you may have taken pride in being an effective interviewer. As an engineering manager, you may have prioritized becoming a strong closer, convincing candidates to join your team. As a more senior manager, you will have likely shifted focus to training others and spending time with candidates for particularly senior roles.

As an engineering executive, your role in the hiring process will shift once again. Y...

Manage your priorities and energy.

Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This “company, team, self” framework proved a helpful decision-making tool, and at the time I felt it almost always led to the correct decision. It also helped me articulate why I disagreed with some of my peers’ decisions, which violated this hierarchy by placing individual or team preferen...

Gelling your Engineering leadership team.

One of the first leadership books I read was Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which introduces the concept of your peers being your “first team” rather than your direct reports. This was a powerful idea for me, because it’s much harder to be a good teammate to your peers than to your direct reports. While your incentives are usually aligned with the team you manage, it’s very common for your incentives to be at odds with your peers’ incentives. The Head of Marketing may want y...

Building personal and organizational prestige

Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known. Similarly, when funding is readily available during periods of tech industry expansion, many companies believe they are principally constrained by their hiring velocity–if their engineering organization’s brand was just a bit better, they believe they’d be hiring much faster.

Writing a great deal online, and work...

Playing with Streamlit and LLMs.

Recently I’ve been chatting with a number of companies who are building outinternal LLM labs/tools for their teams to make it easy to test LLMs againsttheir internal usecases.I wanted to take a couple hours to see how far I could get usingStreamlit to build out a personal LLM lab fora few usecases of my own.

See code on lethain/llm-explorer.

Altogether, I was impressed with how usable Streamlit is, and was able tobuild two useful tools in this timeframe:

a text-based LLM notebook key, wit...

Extract the kernel.

As I’ve served longer in an executive role, I’ve started to notice recurring communication challenges between executives and the folks they work with. The most frequent issue I see is when a literal communicator insists on engaging in the details with a less literal executive.I call the remedy, “extracting the kernel.”

For example, imagine a team is presenting about their upcoming timeline, and the CTO asks, “Can’t you just use ChatGPT to solve that instead of building a custom model?” From the...