Will Larson's Blog, page 20

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 ...

Why not start an indie tech book publisher?

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year thinking about the economics of book publishing now that I have sales trajectories on two book and have gotten to see a bit of the work behind Alex Xu’s System Design Interview – An insider’s guide, swyx’s The Coding Career Handbook, and Gergely Orosz’s Building Mobile Apps at Scale and The Tech Resume Inside Out. By now, I’ve spent enough time thinking about it that I wanted to run through the numbers once so that I can stop thinking about it....

Inspection and the limits of trust.

For a long time, the path to engineering manager began with a prolonged stint of technical leadership.Then you’d transition into an initial management role that balanced people and technical responsibilities.Some companies call this a tech lead manager role.Folks entering those sorts of managerial roles were often the senior-most technical contributor on their team.If they struggled with the transition, many of them would fall back into the familiar habit oftechnical leadership instead of d...

Thesis on engineering onboarding products.

As I’ve started doing a bit more angel investing, I’ve ended up chatting with a handful of folks working on the engineering boarding space, and here is my collection of thoughts on the space.

Engineering onboarding is the process by which a recently hired engineer becomes a proficient contributor to your company. As companies scale, they tend to devote an increasingly large amount of energy into this space. Pulling a few data points from my own experience: Uber sent every new engineer through a ...

2021 in review.

Previously: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

It’s always tricky to figure out the right tone for an annual wrapup post. This has been one of the best years of my life. Our son is now firmly a toddler. I released Staff Engineer and it’s sold about 20,000 copies. I learned a tremendous amount supporting the engineering and data science teams at Calm. My weekly basketball game resumed after a 15 month hiatus. A secondary transaction at a previous company meaningfully changed my life financially. I angel inve...

The terminal level rulebook.

At work, the Staff Engineer cohort has a monthly meeting. The agenda varies but most recently we talked about a common theme: how do you find career progression after reaching your organization’s terminal level?

Reaching the terminal level has a lot in common with graduating from your last educational environment (graduate school, high school, or whatever). Before you graduate, you have clear grades, graduation requirements, exams, and someone else is responsible for teaching you how it works. A...

Should you write a technical or management book?

Since publishing my second book, Staff Engineer, I’ve had more folks popping up for publishing advice. I’ve written a few times about my experience writing books in Self-publishing Staff Engineer (2021) and What I learned writing a book (2019), but neither directly confronts the two questions that folks keep asking, “Should I write a book?” and “How do I publish a book?”

Should I write a book?

When folks ask me this question, my first advice is that you should only write a book if you think you’...