Will Larson's Blog, page 14

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...

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 ...