Will Larson's Blog, page 25

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 ...

Things that aren't engineering strategy.

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

When you’re writing an engineering strategy, what you put in is important, but it’s almost as important to be deliberate about what you choose to leave out. The full list of things to exclude is uncountably vast, but there are a few worth emphasizing in particular.

LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner documented their hierarchy of operating documents as Vision, Mission, Strategy, Objectives, Priorities, Culture, and Values (which some compa...

A survey of engineering strategies.

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

Before attempting to document what an engineering strategy ought to be, it’s useful to sharpen a related problem statement: why do engineering teams decide to write an engineering strategy?

One way to answer that is to work through a handful of the engineering strategies, technical visions, architecture strategies, and so on that folks have written about publicly (I’ve collected more here):

Anna Shipman wrote The difficult t...

Engineering strategy.

One of the projects from my time at Stripe that I’m proud of was writing our engineering strategy, which I later sanitized into a public version in Magnitudes of exploration. The strategy was an elegant document that carefully reconciled two worldviews that had initially appeared incompatible within the engineering organization. While it was both a conceptually pure and utterly pragmatic document, in the end, it wasn’t particularly useful. It reflected how we described making tradeoffs as oppose...

Developer productivity surveys.

While writing Managing technical quality in a codebase, I wanted to find a good reference on running developer productivity surveys, but could only find one related article, How to survey your software developers about their tools. That’s a totally fine article, but it’s advice is much more focused on running an internal survey in general rather than running a developer productivity survey, so I decided to jot down some notes.

What is a developer productivity survey?

A survey you send out to f...

Managing technical quality in a codebase.

If there's one thing that engineers, engineering managers, and technology executives are likely to agree on, it's that there's a crisis of technical quality. One diagnosis and cure is easy to identify: our engineers aren't prioritizing quality, and we need to hire better engineers or retrain the ones we have. Of course, you should feel free to replace "engineers" with "Product Managers" or "executives" if that feels more comfortable. It's a compelling narrative with a clear villain, and it conve...

Finding the right company to reach Staff Engineer.

Note: this is an article for staffeng.com, written for an audience of folks on cusp of reaching a Staff Engineer role.

There are only a few magic spells to attain a Staff-plus role: negotiate for the title while switching roles or find a supportive environment to “bake in place” while building your internal credibility with an empowered sponsor who’ll advocate for you. The most important reagent in both spells is picking the right company to perform them at.

The good news if you’re applying to...