Will Larson's Blog, page 17

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...

STAR method for interview questions.

Fork this template!

A few weeks ago my learning circle started working through each others’ career checkups. Following that, a few folks started talking about framing their experience effectively in interviews. Around the same time, Thiago Ghisi shared a few nice tweets about using the STAR format to answer interview questions. Pulling those all together, it felt like a good time to pull together a quick template to practice using the STAR format to share experiences. I also write up a few examp...

Career checkup template.

Fork this template!

At Uma Chingunde’s suggestion,the learning circle I’m part of is doing a short detouron career trajectory, and I’ve written up a short templateto use. This is similar to a career narrative, but with more focus on self-diagnosis thansomething presentable to others.

I’ve been experimenting with reusable templates over on Infrastructure Engineering,and decided to try something similar here. (That experiment is itself inspiredby Brie Wolfson’s use of templates in The Kool-A...

Plagarism, idea theft, and writing online.

I’ve been in a handful of discussions over the past few weeks about plagiarization: how should authors approach their work being directly or indirectly copied?

When I started writing online in 2007, I was writing to learn to write, and my early stuff showed that, by which I mean it wasn’t very good. I mostly documented stuff I was learning in Django like creating a middleware for Google Analytics (please don’t follow any advice in that article: it’s 15 years out of date) or setting up Django and...

Mailbag: Did I become a manager too soon?

I recently got an email about moving into an engineering managementrole too early in the email writer’s career:

I became an engineering manager two years ago, which was also two years into my career.The reason is mainly that we were a small team and when the time came to add line management I was around and down for it.I have loved this position, and find it extremely fulfilling to be able to remain technical and still have a deeply human job and build strong relationships with my team and a...