Will Larson's Blog, page 19

What is innovation?

At a recent Engineering Q&A session, I spoke a bit about the idea of an innovation budget. We’ll accomplish more in the long-term if we protect some space for innovation in addition to maintaining our focus on immediate goals. That sounds great, someone noted in chat, but what did I even mean when I kept talking about innovation?

There are a lot of ways to think about innovation, but for me I always start with the idea of a hill climbing algorithm. You’re at a point in a two dimensional space, e...

Hard to work with.

Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled change poorly, and I picked up the reputation for being difficult to manage.

I’d like to say that I learned from my mistakes directly, but the honest version is that I came to unde...

Starting to write Infrastructure Engineering.

This is my newest project, Infrastructure Engineer. You can also join the mailing list.

From late 2019 through early 2021, most of my creative output wasfocused on StaffEng, along with the overlapping book, Staff Engineer.I learned a lot working on that project,and it’s doing respectable numbers.I haven’t done much on that project in the past six months, andI spent some time over the Christmas holidays thinking aboutwhat I want to work on next.I write on this blog to capture what I learn...

Trunk and Branches Model for Scaling Infrastructure Organizations

This is an early version of a chapter for Infrastructure Engineering.

Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team.

Later on, things are easy as well. You have seventy engineers spread across eight to ten mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive teams with names like Sto...

Getting started with git-scraping

See this post’s code on Github.

My mother works with a food pantry and recently they have an interestinglogistical challenge: they get nearly free meat donated from another non-profit,but can only order it after the other non-profit updates their website andneed to order it somewhat immediately (within a few hours) of the website’s updates.This sort of thing is a tractable problem if you’re comfortable working in a modern businessenvironment, there are a bunch of vendors that monitor websit...

The impact of less scalable work.

Ellen Chisa has a new newsletter on product management, and I particularly enjoyed this week’s piece on 34 Product Lessons. The bullet of advice that resonated with me most deeply was:

25. When you’re promoted to VP Product, the best thing you can do is make sure to call an experienced VP Product once every week to say “is this normal?" Amazing advice gifted to me by Leland Rechis. The job is so different that it just helps to have someone to talk it through with.

This connects with something ...

Mix and match mental models.

A few days ago, I got to have a delightful chat with Katie Wilde, digging into a question that we’ve both found difficult to answer: what distinguishes managers perceived to have good judgment from those perceived to have bad judgment? In exploring that question, the topic of mental models came up frequently.

Mental model is a somewhat overloaded term, but roughly means having a structured view on a given topic. This structured view allows you to predict how changes will propagate across the ent...

Index of writing on hiring.

Having spent a fair amount of time giving hiring process advice, I wanted to collect my hiring advice into a single index. Read through until you find a section that applies for you, and then read that.

If you don’t have an interview process with consistent interviews and interviewers, read Designing interview loopsIf you’re not sure where your loop is having issues, read Your hiring funnel and Modeling a hiring funnel with Systems libraryIf managers are responsible for sourcing candidates an...

Things I learned hiring a data science leader.

I’m ending the year by pushing a handful of drafts that have something useful but that I’ll probably never finish. I’ve dubbed this draft week, and this is one of them!

Earlier this year I spent time designing, running, and tweaking the hiring process for a Head of Data Science. While I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about structuring and sizing engineering teams, I’ve come to appreciate that effective approaches are fact-specific. I wanted to avoid assuming that what I knew about engineering ...

Dipping toes in angel investing.

I’m ending the year by pushing a handful of drafts that have something useful but that I’ll probably never finish. I’ve dubbed this draft week, and this is one of them!

As I get a bit deeper into my career, I’ve gotten a bit more focused on exploring the professional side-projects folks take on. In the past few years, I’ve spent time getting a sense for book writing, conference speaking, and podcast speaking. Some of those I’ve enjoyed (book writing), others I’m not planning to do much more of ...