Will Larson's Blog, page 23

Early Edition of "Staff Engineer" coming Jan 31st.

Preorder Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track on Gumroad for January 31st, and Amazon for February 28th.

For much of 2020, I worked on the StaffEng project, collecting stories from folks about their experience reaching a Staff-plus engineering role, and synthesizing those stories with my own experience into a career guide. Behind the scenes, I’ve also been shaping that content in a book.

For the most part, I'm waiting until later this month to do outreach and marketing: blu...

Pacing and isolating change.

One of the downsides of being a group manager is that you spend most of your time on change management, but it must be said that organizational change management is a pretty interesting topic, particularly within a fast growing company.

Gelled teams–teams that know how to work together effectively–are considerably more effective than newly formed teams, but can be difficult to maintain when you’re hiring rapidly. One strategy for allowing teams to gel is to have a predictable fast-slow hiring c...

Tech Lead Management roles are a trap.

The tech lead manager role is often presented as an easy on-ramp to team manager,
but my experience is that being a tech lead manager is a considerably harder first management role than pure team management.
Rather than an on-ramp, tech lead manager roles are usually a trap for first-time managers.

The theory of the tech lead manager is that you find a capable engineer who is defacto leading part of the team,
and make them the official manager for that sub-team. Because they're already defacto ...

Interesting work happens at the edges.

Many engineering managers become obsessed with the transition to managing managers rather than managing a team directly. I’ve seen that pursuit of managerial scope become almost an obsession for some folks. That’s a shame, because group management is a very different job than team management, and is often both less rewarding and less likely to facilitate ongoing learning. In particular, I often get email from folks considering joining a hypergrowth company in pursuit of their first group managem...

2020 in review.

Previously: 2019, 2018, 2017

This has been a uniquely challenging year, especially nationally and globally. Personally, it's also been a very special year for me and my family. I returned from parental leave this week, and it's felt like enough has happened this year and my return is enough of a transitionary moment to write a "year in review"-style post for 2020 now, rather than waiting for the end of the month. This post doesn't have some sort of deliberate intent, it's more of a mental...

Weak and strong team concepts.

Engineers are often frustrated that their management treats us like fungible resources when were unique humans. On the other hand, engineers usually view individual ownership as a managerial failure, critical systems need to be owned by teams not by individuals. At a certain remove, these seem like contradicting beliefstheyre notand thinking about how both can be true brings us to an idea Ive been reflecting on a lot recently: weak team concepts and strong team concepts.

Weak here isnt meant...

What do Staff engineers actually do?

The role of a Staff-plus engineer depends a lot on what the team needs and also what the particular engineer strengths are. From my experience the responsibilities of a Staff-plus engineer can change over time, but usually their main focus is working on projects/efforts that have strategic value for the company, while driving technical design and up-leveling their team. - Diana Pojar

Anyone who has been cornered by relatives at a party and asked to explain what software engineers actually do kn...

Managing Staff-plus engineers.

While getting feedback on StaffEng, one request was for more content on managing Staff-plus engineers. It doesn’t quite fit the theme–that effort is focused on the Staff Engineer themselves rather the company or the manager–but it’s an interesting topic and a worthy appendix.

Of course, not all aspects of managing Staff-plus folks is unique to the level: there are fundamentals that apply to managing anyone in any role, like doing effective 1 on 1s or giving feedback. For that sort of thing, rea...

Write five, then synthesize: good engineering strategy is boring.

I kind of think writing about engineering strategy is hard because good strategy is pretty boring, and it's kind of boring to write about. Also I think when people hear "strategy" they think "innovation" - Camille Fournier

Few companies understand their engineering strategy and vision. One consequence of this uncertainty is the industry belief that these documents are difficult to write. In some conversations it can feel like you’re talking about something mystical, but these are just mundane d...

Mailbag: Advice for someone five years into their tech career?

I recently got an email asking for some perspective that was general enough that I thought it might make more sense to answer as another mailbag post. The lightly edited core of the email was:

What advice would you give someone five years in their tech career?
What should someone focus on in the world of fast-evolving tech?
Also, how did you find the right mentors in the course of your career?

These three questions relate a bit, but are sufficiently different that I’ll answer them indepen...