Will Larson's Blog, page 23

Staff Engineer.

Buy Staff Engineer on Gumroad and Amazon.

After a bit of a lead up, so deeply excited that the Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track book is done.As of today you can buy the digital version on Gumroad,as well as the digital and paperback versions on AmazonThis project overlapped with a new job (at Calm), our first child (now eight months), and a global pandemic.In some ways, I'm surprised it got finished, but in another sense it was nourishmentduring a difficult year, an...

Why not create a StaffEng Slack or Discord?

I’m in the process of releasing Staff Engineer, and a really great question I’ve gotten a few times recently has been, “Are you planning to create a Slack or Discord server focused on creating a Staff-plus engineering community?”

The answer is no, but the longer answer is more interesting.

One of my focuses last year was learning more about creating new communities, and towards that end I did two experiments in community creation. In January, I created a handful of CTO/VPE/Staff Engineer lea...

How to be a tech influencer.

In a one-on-one before the holidays, a coworker expressed an interest in being more influential outside of the company and wanted my advice. There’s a similar email I get semi-regularly asking whether folks looking to advance their career should start blogging, write a book, or whatnot.

Although few folks meaningfully influence the industry through content creation, a vast number of folks further their careers by creating content. Create a small number of meaningful pieces, develop a distributi...

How to present to executives.

Have you presented to company executives about a key engineering initiative, walking into the room excited and leaving defeated? Maybe you only made it to your second slide before unrelated questions derailed the discussion. Maybe you worked through your entire presentation only to have folks say, “Great job,” and leave without any useful debate. Afterward, you’re not quite sure what happened, but you know it didn’t go well.

Early in your career, you probably won’t interact with company executi...

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...