Will Larson's Blog, page 13

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...

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 ...