Will Larson's Blog, page 25

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...

Deciding to switch companies.

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

My father was a professor of economics. After he completed his PhD in his late twenties, he started teaching at one university, got tenure at that university, and walked out forty-some years later into retirement. Working in technology, that sounds like a fairytale.

There are very few software companies with a forty-year track record, and even fewer folks whose forty-year care...

TechWriters community.

In part "stuck away from friends due to pandemic" inspired, I've been wishing there was a tech writing community for semi-serious writers. As an experiment, I'm trying to spin up a Discord server to create such a community.

Read a bit more about the project at techwriters.dev.

My hope is this will become a healthy, positive place to talk about creating tech and tech-adjacent,
particularly for folks who do it semi-seriously: frequently bloggers, book authors, public speakers and so on.
Creating...

Being visible.

Bert Fan’s best advice for those trying to reach a Staff-plus role was,

often reaching Staff is a combination of luck, timing, and work.

Timing is a particular sort of luck, so in some ways you can simplify this even further down to just luck and work.

If you’re fortunate, then you won’t have to pursue a deliberate path to a Staff-plus role.. You’re already working on your company’s top priorities, have a well-positioned manager who cares about supporting your career, and are working from you...

Staff projects.

A popular recurring idea around reaching a Staff-plus role is that first you need to successfully complete a “Staff project.” A project that is considered complex and important enough that the person who completes it has proven themselves as a Staff engineer. However popular this idea is, if you’re pursuing a Staff-plus role it’s important to pierce the mythology of these projects and focus on the experiences of folks who’ve walked the path before you.

The short answer on Staff projects is that...