Will Larson's Blog, page 13

Grab bag of random thoughts.

A bit over a week from now, I’ll be joining a company to start a new role, and I wanted to ramble a bit to braindumpthe numerous loose threads in my head as I transitioned from Calm to the past month of full-time writing, and theninto this new role.This isn’t really a job announcement post per se, as I won’t share any details about the job itself until I’ve officially started. Instead, this is a snapshot of what’s top of mind for me, particularly driven by the dozens of discussions with frien...

Interviewing engineering executives.

Earlier I wrote about getting hired as an Engineering executive, and it’s perhaps even more important to discuss the opposite question: how should you interview and evaluate Engineering executives? As an Engineering executive, you may not directly run one of these searches, but you’ll likely be asked for advice about how to run them, and may be asked to design the process to hire your successor.

The key topics I want to explore are:

Avoiding the unicorn searchHow interviewing executives goes w...

Poking around OpenAI.

I haven’t spent much time playing around with the latest LLMs,and decided to spend some time doing so. I was particularly curiousabout the usecase of using embeddings to supplement user promptswith additional, relevant data (e.g. supply the current status of theirrecent tickets into the prompt where they might inquire about progress onsaid tickets). This usecase is interesting because it’s very attainablefor existing companies and products to take advantage of, and I imagine it’sroughly h...

How to plan as an engineering executive.

Some years back, I interviewed a senior leader for an engineering role, and asked them a question about planning. I enjoyed their response, “Ah yes, the ‘P’ word, planning.” That answer captured an oft heard perspective that planning is some sort of business curse word. Even when it goes well, planning is an objectively difficult task. When it goes poorly, the business loses months or years of potential progress. Despite those challenges, guiding your company’s plans towards the right work is un...

Who runs Engineering processes?

Uber ran a tech spec review process called the DUCK Review. “DUCK” didn’t stand for anything–it was created as a deliberate non-acronym–but was otherwise a fairly typical review process. When I first joined, we’d review one or two specs each week.The volume of requested reviews kept growing, and six months later there was a one to two week delay between requesting a reviewand receiving feedback.A year after that the process was disbanded due to lack of bandwidth to process all the incoming sp...

Onboarding peer executives.

While many companies build out an elaborate Engineering onboarding program, the process for onboarding new executives tends to be an ad-hoc, chaotic affair. There usually is an executive onboarding process, but it’s used too infrequently to ever get excellent.Part of the problem is similar to that of an executive job search: every executive and role is unique, and it’s hard to create a repeatable program to handle one-of-a-kind onboardings.

The other part of the problem is that the executive’s ...

Deciding to leave your (executive) job.

If two friendly executives meet for dinner, it’s likely they start by exchanging just how messed up things are at work.Initiatives are behind, layoffs are happening everywhere, the team is in disarray.Then they’ll laugh, and switch topics. Sometimes one of the executives can’t navigate the switch, and will keep ranting throughout their meal.Having problems is part of being an executive, but when you’re that second executive who can’t turn off the frustration, it’s time to start thinking about...

Using cultural survey data.

When I was at Stripe, I reworked the hiring process for Director-plus engineering managers.My goal was to better evaluate polished senior leaders who always said the right thing.I wanted to find the real beliefs and behaviors underneath all the polish.One interview focused on a direct report sharing a mediocre strategy proposal for review,and getting a signal on whether the candidate could give useful feedback on improving the document.I knew that interview worked when a candidate said that...

Running your engineering onboarding program.

Most companies say that it takes three to six months for newly hired engineers to fully ramp up.Engineering leaders know it’s impolitic to admit that it takes their team longer than three to six months to onboard new engineers,so that’s what they say out loud, but they generally believe it takes longer for a new engineer to become fully productive.They also know that their most impactful engineers are still becoming more productive after years with the company.

Running engineering onboarding ...

Engineering’s role in Mergers & Acquisitions.

I managed the engineering team at Digg as we ran out of money, and were eventually acquired. It was an eye opening experience, and I learned a great deal about the reality and the optics of selling a company, particularly one with no money and a shrinking user base. Humbling was just the beginning.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to evaluate a number of companies from the other side of the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) table. Most of those discussions didn’t move forward, but a handful hav...