Will Larson's Blog, page 17

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...

One-on-ones with executives.

Often when an organization is going through some turmoil, executives think to themselves, “Ah, I should have some one-on-ones with the team so they can hear how we’re handling this.” On the other side, I frequently hear from folks who get nervous when they get these meeting invites, “The CEO/CTO/CPO/etc just scheduled a one-on-one with me! What am I supposed to talk to them about?” There’s no universal guide to this, but you can usually categorize these meetings into a small taxonomy of meetings...

'Drawing your three maps' exercise

I get to lead a monthly session with Calm’s staff engineers.Some months that is mostly a Q&A, but I find the best sessions have at least some component of directed learning. For example, we recently did a session on presenting to executives, which we used to dig into a decision I’d just made that had frustrated several folks in the session.However, at this point we’ve already done sessions on most of the “operating at staff” topics from Staff Engineer, so I’ve been tryingto dig up more topics...

Bar raisers, hiring committees, and other complex ways to improve hiring quality.

When Uber Engineering reached 800 engineers, engineering was divided across roughly five engineering directors. Most engineering and process issues were resolved locally within these five organizations. This worked well for the most part, but meant there was little consistency within our core processes. Hiring was particularly fragmented, with every team’s manager responsible for developing their own interviews, questions and structure.

However, no matter which team initially hired an engineer, ...

How to estimate disk space.

A few years ago while interviewing Nelson Elhage for Staff Engineer,he mentioned “estimation” as a particularly valuable skill. I hadn’t thought much about the ideaof estimation as a skill, but his comment made me remember one of the best architecture interviews I’ve ever given,where the candidate was able to significantly narrow down the possible solutions by asking for a few details(as best I can remember: queries per second, expected number of rows, and necessary columns).

Historically, I...

Reading a Profit & Loss statement.

Some years ago, I was explaining to my manager that I was feeling a bit bored, and theytold me to learn how to read aProfit & Loss (P&L) statement.At the time, that sounded suspiciously like, “Stop wasting my time,” but operating in an executive role has shifted my perspectivea bit: this is actually a surprisingly useful thing to learn.The P&L statement is a map of a company’s operation and is an effective tool for pointing you towardsthe most pressing areas to dig in.

While there is a lot...

Downturn career decisions.

When I joined Yahoo In 2008, I received a small number of options. I don’t remember how many–it was very few–but I do know my strike price was roughly $16. I don’t remember that because my strike price was particularly lucrative, but rather because some of my coworkers would complain about their underwater strike prices in the $50s. Given the stock was trading at roughly $18, it was easy to understand why the folks on my team were a bit perturbed. As best I can tell, those options held by my cow...