Will Larson's Blog, page 16

2019 - 2022 reading recap.

If this seems redundant, I did indeed accidentally release a draft version of this list earlier in the year.

In 2018, I put together my book recommendations,and while I don’t currently have any ambition to reflesh that list (those are pretty timeless books!),I decided to collect the non-fiction books I’ve read since writing that list through the end of 2022,which is roughly 2019 through 2022.I’m certain that I’ll miss a few, but here is a fairly representative list,particularly those where ...

When shouldn't you roll out business reviews?

Earlier this week I got an email from a friend asking whether they should roll out business reviews at the company they’d just joined as the head of engineering, and inevitably the answer is, “Maybe!”

I recently pulled together a template for Monthly Business Reviews, which are an exceptionally effective meeting format for operating a business: each functional leader writes a metrics-heavy report about their past month, and discusses it with the other functional leaders. A well-run business revi...

Company, team, self.

Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This company/team/self framework proved itself a helpful decision-making tool, and almost always led to the “correct” outcome. It also helped me articulate why I disagreed with some of my peers’ decisions, which violated this hierarchy by placing individual or team preferences over the compa...

Twitter.

I joined Twitter in March, 2007.My first tweet was anything but glorious,“Sitting in Networking class. Not enjoying it.”Ten tweets before receiving my first like.Another fifty before my second.Reading my early tweets, I was confused by this lack of likes.I slowly remembered: likes didn’t exist. Instead there were favorites,bookmarks rather than algorithmic boosts.The absence of replies also felt odd.I was clearly having conversationswith two college classmate (the only people I knew on...

The flying wedge.

When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. Instead, our Director brought on a colleague he’d worked with before. That new manager soon decided he needed a tech lead on his team. We didn’t run a hiring process, do interviews, or consider candidates on the existing team. Instead, our new manager brought over one of his previous colleagues. A third previous colleague reached out to our Director, and without a single i...

Work hard / work smart.

Twitter, Lyft, Stripe and several other companies had major layoffs last week, and with the undeniable tragedy of layoffs, a frequent debate has reemerged. Are the tech employees working hard enough? Is working hard a sign of puritanical virtue? Are long hours a sign of inefficient production that ignores a century of productivity research?

Unless you place a premium on social networking engagement, participating in these debates isn’t very rewarding. Folks enter the discussion with their mind m...

Time and energy.

A few weeks ago I bought a piano. It’s a digital piano, which I’m quite excited about for a few reasons: I remain haunted by forgetting to water our piano as a child, it was a ninety pound package that I could install myself rather than a standard piano’s seven hundred pound stature, and most importantly it actually fit in the available nook. One motivation was that our son loves music. If you put him near a piano he will bang on, and on, and on. I’ve also been feeling a bit of a hole in my life...

Mailbag: What isn't measurable? To hire as exec or not?

This is a mailbag of several different questions I’ve been asked over the past few weeks.

What isn’t measurable?

A friend of mine is interviewing for engineering leadership roles and brought an interesting question into our group chat from one of their interviews, “What are outcomes that you can’t measure with metrics?” For the record, I’m skeptical this is a good interview question, my most generous read is that it’s trying to detect pragmatic, experienced leadership because experienced leaders...

Reminiscing: the retreat to comforting work.

In Work on what matters, I wrote about Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. The best story of my own snacking behaviors comes from my time at Stripe. I was focused on revamping the engineering organization’s approach to operating reliable software, and decided that it might also make sense to start an internal book club. It was, dear reader, not the right time to start a book club. Once you start looking for this behavior, it is everywhere, includin...

Fewer, happier incident heroes.

My wife was kind enough to review a piece I’m writing about incident response, and brought up a related topic that I couldn’t fit into that article but is infinitely fascinating: how should companies respond to a small group of engineers who become critical responders in almost all incidents?

This happens at many companies, usually along the lines of: a few long-tenured engineers, who happen to have the explicit access credentials to all key systems and implicit permission to use them, help resp...