Will Larson's Blog, page 15

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...

Mailbag: What should you do if you report to an underperforming executive?

Recently, an email came in asking what to do when you report into a mediocre or underperforming executive.I’ve gotten variants of this question a number of times over the years, and it’s worth digging into a bit:

Have you written anything about working in middle management where you are managing a high performing team but under a low performing executives?How do you demonstrate your value to the broader organization so that your team remains motivated,and you can eventually move across group...

Trying Plausible.

I’ve been wanting to spend some time trying out recentdeveloper and infrastructure tooling, starting with taking Tailscale for a spin(it’s quite nice).Next, I’ve been thinking about replacing Google Analytics on this blog for some time,and decided to try out Plausible.io as a replacement.

For the record, I don’t have any profound gripes with Google Analytics, rather I’d say thatI’m profoundly grateful to GA. It’s a tool that I’ve greatly benefitted from over the past decade,and it hasn’t c...

Getting a job as an engineering executive.

I started my first executive job search when I was 25.Eventually, I got an offer to lead engineering at a startup with four engineers,which I turned down to join Uber.It wasn’t until a decade later that I joined Calm and started my first executive role.If you start researching executive career paths, you’ll findfolks who nominally become engineering executives at 21 when they found a company,and other that are 30+ years into their career without taking an engineering executive role.

As the...

Make an effective executive LinkedIn profile.

tl;dr - it’s valuable to update your LinkedIn profile to be a concise, accurate, and current summary of your accomplishment. Spend at most two hours updating it, then ask a friend (ideally a recruiter) for feedback. Incorporate that feedback and don’t think about your profile again for at least a year.

While writing my notes on landing an engineering executive role, a topic that came up in feedback a number of times was how valuable it is to have a reasonably good LinkedIn profile. There’s abso...

How to capitalize engineering costs.

There are many important meetings in your first ninety days as a new engineering leader, but one that’s both easy to forget and surprisingly important is your first meeting with the finance team. There’s a lot to learn from the finance team, particularly drilling into your profit and loss statement, but there’s one narrow topic that causes a surprising amount of frustration between engineering and finance teams: how do you capitalize software engineering costs?

Capitalizing software costs is a f...

Trying Tailscale.

Like most folks working in infrastructure engineering in 2014, I really enjoyed Google’s BeyondCorp whitepaper. My foremost personal interest was grounded in the fact that Uber’s contemporaneous security implementation didn’t include a VPN, so it was interesting to see a well-thought description of fostering security without over-reliance on a hardened network for employee devices. I had a second, longer-term, personal interest as well, which was never again having to argue with a coworker about...