Will Larson's Blog, page 14

Building your executive network.

In most of my roles, I’ve learned more from my peers than from my manager. Even when you get along well with your manager, your peers’ perspective will usually be closer to yours than your manager’s. Once you transition into an engineering executive role, you’ll still have peers, but they’re a different sort of peer, who will look at problems from a very different perspective than yours. If you ask the head of product for feedback, they will give it, but it’ll come from a product perspective. Th...

ReadME contribution on reliability programs.

I was excited to contribute an article,Move past incident response to reliabilityto Github’s The ReadME project.

This topic was particularly on my mind when I wrote it towards the end of last year,when I was focused on my Infrastructure Engineering project.That project is a bit paused at the moment, as I’m focused on another project that I’llget to announce in the next month or two. (No details there yet, but if you look at myrecent writing, you can probably make a good guess.)I will get ...

Writing an engineering strategy.

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background.Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off,at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy.It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly.If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay.For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them:what ...

Better to micromanage than be disengaged.

For a long time, I found the micromanager CEO archetype very frustrating to work with.They would often pop out of nowhere, jab holes in the work I had done without understanding the tradeoffs,and then disappear when I wanted to explain my decisions.In those moments, I wished they would trust me based on my track record of doing good work.If they didn’t trust my track record, could they at least take the time to talk through the situation so I could explain my decisions?!

At those moments, I ...

Culture vs systems.

Recently, I had a chat with a friend who was frustrated by their company culture. They’d been pushing the company to operate with more urgency, but didn’t feel like it was landing. “How do we,” they wondered, “get the team to recognize that urgency is essential to our success?” They were convinced this was an internal cultural problem, mentioning the classic, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” quote often attributed to Peter Drucker, although probably incorrectly.

One of my great sins as a le...

Setting engineering org values.

Uber’s best known corporate value is probably Super Pumped,which, in addition to being a one-time company value, is also the title of Mike Isaac’s account of Uberand the subsequent television show.However, for me personally, the value I remember most is Let Builders Build.

Working in Uber’s infrastructure engineering organization, I once chatted with a product engineering managerwho wanted to continue rolling out a new feature that was hammering the production database.I was concerned that ...

Safe defaults.

Back in 2018, when I first wrote about sizing engineering teams, I was surprised how much my advice rankled a colleague. He wanted to spin up a new engineering team of two people, which I thought was a bad idea. It would be a fragile team that would fall apart quickly if it didn’t grow. It would be missing the components we’d seen make other teams successful, like an engaged manager or ability to handle on-call if someone took a vacation. Finally, I argued that there was no real advantage to cre...

Internal comms for executives.

Whenever an executive joins a new company, there is an awkward mergerbetween the executive’s preferred communication style and the norms that organization has already established.I remember a recently joined executive complaining that engineers weren’t reading his emails.He “solved” that problem by sending another email, this one instructing the team that they were responsible for reading their email twice a day.

You won’t be shocked to learn that this didn’t really solve the problem. Most co...

What does it mean to be a cost center?

When I shared my piece on Measuring an engineering organization, one point I made was that focusing too heavily on optimization metrics (e.g. things like CI/CD time) can turn engineering into a cost center. That’s not because optimization metrics aren’t important, they’re extremely important! Rather, it’s inherent to what it means to refer to an organization as a cost center.

First, an obligatory definition from Investopedia:

A cost center is a department or function within an organization that...

Meetings for an effective eng organization.

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that any given meeting isn’t helpful, then iterate on it, and consider pausing it for the time being.It may not be useful for your organization yet, but don’t give up on the idea of meetings.

Good meetin...