Will Larson's Blog, page 24

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...

Speaking and podcasts in 2020.

My plan for 2020 was to pause public speaking and events to focus on my (then new, still new-ish) role at Calm as well as the StaffEng project. That said, I’ve still done a bit of speaking as opportunities came up, and I’ll continue to update this post as more come up:

Staff Engineering with Will Larson on Software Engineering Daily. October 29th, 2020
How to Influence Others as a Senior IC, Panel discussion at ELC Virtual Summit. October 22nd, 2020
Okta Showcase 2020 Digital Experiences Panel...

Engineering strategy every org should write.

Writing my recent article on Engineering strategy was one of the most challenging pieces of writing I’ve done in the past few years because I had far more ideas than I could fit into a coherent narrative. I extracted a number of those into semi-edited snippets filed under the “strategy” tag, and here is the last one in that vein.

The question I want to briefly explore here is, “What strategies should most engineering organizations try to document?” I’ve taken a somewhat overly broad view of wha...

Surplus rules of engineering strategy.

This is pruned from an in-progress article on engineering strategy.

While sharing my advice for writing an engineering strategy, my second draft had an extended section of “rules for writing engineering strategies.” I think these were all useful, but it was a piece that suffered for too many ideas, and I ended up removing most of them.

I think they’re useful, so I’ve included them here. For context, the rules that I kept in the original piece are:

Start where you are (start small; start loca...

Care and feeding for your engineering strategy.

This is pruned from an in-progress article on engineering strategy.

If by some act of perseverance and skill you write an engineering strategy that’s well-received by your organization, then you’re faced with the next challenge. How do you keep this living document alive past that initial burst of excitement?

The most important thing to remember is to continue steering attention its way. Refer back to it frequently when you’re doing system design or resolving a disagreement on approach. Track ...