Will Larson's Blog, page 24

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...

Notes on compliance tools.

Recently I’ve been chatting more with Chris Stobie, Calm’s Engineering Director of Infrastructure
(obligatory, come work with us!),
about how we can get more value from our compliance work.
As any company starts selling and partnering with larger companies, the size and quantity
of security reviews increase, and fulfilling some of the better-known security regimes
is the most reliable way to reduce that overhead.

To learn a bit from the community, I
tweeted out curious if folks thought highly o...

Interviewing for Staff-plus roles.

When you decide to interview for a Senior engineer role, you roughly know what to expect. You’ll refresh your resume, work through Cracking the Coding Interview, and do some research on the company to prepare questions. When you go into the interview, you know it’s going to be five-ish interviews composed of a few programming exercises, something about technical architecture, and some cultural, behavioral, or career questions.

It would be amazing if you could start a Staff-plus interview proces...

Interivewing for Staff-plus roles.

When you decide to interview for a Senior engineer role, you roughly know what to expect. You’ll refresh your resume, work through Cracking the Coding Interview, and do some research on the company to prepare questions. When you go into the interview, you know it’s going to be five-ish interviews composed of a few programming exercises, something about technical architecture, and some cultural, behavioral, or career questions.

It would be amazing if you could start a Staff-plus interview proces...

Finding your Staff sponsor.

As I’ve spoken with more folks trying to reach their first Staff-plus role, most folks run into similar challenges. Many have miscalibrated their own impact, and simply haven’t done the work yet to operate at that level: a Staff Engiener isn’t just a faster Senior Engineer. However, there’s a large cohort who have done the work–they’re visible across their organization and have pulled together a strong promotion packet–but are still struggling to have that work recognized.

These folks are often...

My skepticism towards current developer meta-productivity tools.

It’s hard to write about engineering leadership in 2020 and not mention the research from Accelerate and DORA. They provide a data-driven perspective on how to increase developer productivity, which is a pretty magical thing. Why aren’t they being used more widely?

There are three core problems I see:

The nefarious trap of using productivity measurements to evaluate rather than learn
Instrumenting productivity pipeline requires operating across so many different tools
Most instrumentation and...

Renegotiating your first vendor contract.

A while back I wrote Build versus buy, which discussed evaluating vendor tools against building in-house solutions. A short summary of that piece is that I think most companies should use more vendor tooling. That said, I think rather than advice on how to select vendor tools, for most engineers an even more helpful topic is renegotiating an expiring contracts their organization already has.

In a large, established company, you’ll have a vendor management or procurement team who you can partner...