Will Larson's Blog, page 21

Notes on hiring a Foundation Eng leader.

I’ve recently had a few folks reach out for advice on hiring a Foundation Engineering leader based on my supporting that organization at Stripe. The first challenge with the question is defining what “Foundation Engineering” even means!

I joined Stripe to work with the “Sys” engineering group, which was short for “Systems,” and there were about thirty folks in Sys within the larger infrastructure organization that had… maybe sixty folks working across data, developer tools, financial infrastruct...

Closing calls: tell the best version of the truth.

Quite a few companies run you through their interview process, send you an offer nestled in a beautifully designed packet, and finish with a recruiter who’ll ask whether you accept the offer. This is the foundation of a hiring funnel, but it’s missing one valuable step: the closing call.

By the end of your hiring funnel, both you and the candidate have already invested a lot of time, and even slightly nudging them towards a “yes” will significantly improve your hiring efficiency. (Another prospe...

Create capacity rather than capture it.

Most growth companies are starved for experienced leadership. As they expand, continued growth builds up pressure on their existing leadership. This gets quite stressful! The rare executive manages to build an effective organization solely by investing in their existing team, but most supplement their organization with some external hires to maintain a balance of folks who’ve seen it before and folks who’re actively learning their role.

If you’re an executive challenged by your company’s growth,...

Getting to yes: solving engineering manager hiring loops that reject every candidate.

Hiring engineering managers is difficult, and many companies struggle with it. It’s a challenge to establish an effective interview loop. It’s tricky to convince candidates about your company’s opportunity. It can be hard to even get candidates to talk to you. Solving these issues takes time, but it’s fairly well understood work. What confuses many companies is that they solve all of these issues, and they still can’t hire engineering managers.

Companies struggling here often start to manufactur...

Pockets of rest enable careers.

Being burnt out at work feels like this year’s life crisis. Almost every conversation I have with a friend in the industry lingers on the topic of struggling to focus at work. Last week, I was chatting with a friend and we diagnosed their core career ambition as the deep desire to spend several years sleeping. Reflecting on the chaos of the last year, that does, indeed, sound like a solid career plan.

When asked for advice, I come back to two core bits.

First, try to avoid making career decision...

Can senior leaders make friends at work?

Chatting with a friend recently, they asked a question that I’ve spent time wondering about as well, “Can senior leaders have friends at work?” It’s reductive to pretend there’s one universal answer to this question, but most folks find it increasingly challenging to have friends at work as you get more senior. There are multiple factors at work, and it’s interesting to dig into it a bit.

The biggest reason is that your peers have already developed a full life outside of work. Earlier in their c...

An interlude.

A few months ago around nine on a Wednesday evening, my vision blurred, and I lost my sense of balance. It seemed like a fine time to go to bed. When I attempted to explain my predicament to my wife, it turned out I’d also lost my ability to communicate verbally. I was having a stroke. My wife–wiser than I and besieged by the mismatched words that I believed constituted communication–collected our infant son, coaxed me into the car, and we were at the nearby hospital a few minutes later.

With Co...

Mailbag: Should we just call them architects?

A couple of days ago, I got another question about Staff Engineer,which felt worth digging into a bit:

I started reading your new book Staff Engineer and wondering if you can write about your thoughts on the difference between what we know as Technical Architect vs Staff Engineer. It looks like the big companies ditched the “Architect” title and invented the “Staff Engineer.” The more I read your book, the more I feel like Staff Engineers are plain old tech architects. Having set up an archite...

RSS feed changing! Migrating blog in next few days.

tl;dr - subscribe to RSS via /feeds.xml instead of /feeds/

The current version of this blog has been running for about four years,since I wrote Notes from fifth blog rewrite.It’s been running as a Golang service that loaded posts and files from S3,which has worked out surprisingly well for most purposes.However, there are a few things that have taken a bit of effort to keep working.In particular have spent a few hours each year on the GCP Kubernetes cluster, the Docker builds, and LetsEncry...

Mailbag: How to deal with unhappy users on your Internal platform?

I'm in the early stages of working with my friend, Rachael Stedman,on an "Ask an engineering leadership" project where we try to answer folks challenging engineering leadership questions.This is one of the questions that came in that wasn't a perfect fit for that project(we're still callibrating a bit on what is a perfect fit), but still a question I wanted to take a stab at answering.

I work as an Engineering Manager at a large organization, supporting team managers across four teams who wo...