Will Larson's Blog, page 20

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’...

Notes on The Kool-Aid Factory's Planning Issue.

Recently I’ve been thinking a bunch about planning, and have been casting around for resources to work through while refining my approach. To my good fortune, my previous colleague, Brie Wolfson, has been working on a project delving into company process, The Kool-Aid Factory, and she has an excellent issue on planning.

These are my notes from The Kool-Aid Factory’s Planning issue.

(Note that I’m abbreviating The Kool-Aid Factory as TKAF from here on out.)

Planning’s purpose

TKAF defines the goa...

How to find engineering leadership roles.

I was recently chatting with a friend who asked about finding senior leadership roles, and particularly doing so while you’re already gainfully employed. The context of this discussion was managerial leadership roles within a software engineering organization, which for convenience I’m defining as leading groups of 20+ engineers (e.g. Director at Series C or later company) or being a functional leader of a smaller team (CTO, VPE).

Conducting a career search within these roles is odd for a few re...

How to safely think in systems.

The second most impactful book I’ve read is George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant which lays out his theory of communication. Lakoff explores a fundamental organizational challenge: as you grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate when you’re not in the room where a discussion happens. I once worked with a staff engineer who described their most significant contribution as giving initiatives catchy names and slogans to propel ideas further than any supporting data might.

That s...

Learning about personal finances.

Having a kid around has changed my perspective on many things, among them wanting to get more consistent in how our family approaches financial decisions. This is an area where I’ve spent a fair amount of time educating myself over the past decade, and I thought it might be useful for folks to see how my thinking has developed over my career, particularly given I started out knowing absolutely nothing on the topic.

For the first six years of my career, I accumulated money in a bank account. I di...