Will Larson's Blog, page 12

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...

Slides for Measuring an engineering organization.

Last week, I gave a 30 minute talk to a group of CTOs and VP Engineerings in San Franciscoabout measuring engineering organizations.This talk was essentially this blog post,and here are the slides.

A few topics worth highlighting:

Measurement educates you, and your audience, about the area being measured.Even flawed measures can be very effective educators.Don’t get caught up on not measuring things because they have some flaws,let the audience learn about those flawsInstrumentation is c...

Good hypergrowth/curator manager.

In 2016, I wrote Productivity in the age of hypergrowth to discuss the challenges of engineering management during periods of hypergrowth. Managers in such periods spend much of their time on hiring and onboarding, with the remainder devoted to organizational structure and high-level strategy. Their technical expertise is important, but it’s demonstrated indirectly in the quality of their strategy, structure, and hiring.

In 2023, our universe has shifted. There’s little hiring happening, and mos...

The Engineering Executive's Primer.

See on O’Reilly’s website for The Engineering Executive’s Primer.

In 2019, I worked with Stripe Press to publish my first book, An Elegant Puzzle,which captured many of the lessons I’d learned as an engineering manager in fast growing Silicon Valley companies.In 2021, I decided to learn the entire process of publishing myself, self publishing my second book,Staff Engineer, which synthesized the stories of a number of individualsinto a framework to attaining and operating in Staff-plus engine...

Balancing your CEO, peers, and Engineering.

There are so many stories of hiring a new executive who comes in and wreaks havoc. I’ve seen engineering leaders start with a giant, doomed migration, marketing leaders who accelerate expenses until they necessitate a round of layoffs, and a number of executives fired in their first month. When people tell these stories, it’s almost always framed as a failure of the individual executives, but they happen so frequently that I believe there’s an underlying structural challenge in addition to indiv...