Will Larson's Blog, page 26

Work on what matters.

We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled by many things beyond work: supporting your family, children, exercise, being a mentor and a mentee, hobbies, and so the list goes on. This is the sign of a rich life, but one side-effect is that time to do your work will become increasingly scarce as you get deeper into your career.

If you’re continuing to advance in ...

Using QR Codes in printed books.

Probably my favorite parts of An Elegant Puzzle is the QR codes
we created for each link as an exploration of how print and digital can comingle a
bit more easily.

As I start thinking about how to turn staffeng.com
into a book, I'm keen to recreate this feature, but even moreso I'm curious
if this time I can push it a bit closer to the original vision.

Cool URIs don't change

Ok, so we know that Cool URIs don't change,
but now that the book has been out in the wild for over a year, the biggest...

Build a network of peers.

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com.

As I talk to more and more Staff-plus engineers about career advice, the most consistent recommendation was to develop a personal network of peers doing similar work. Not every person emphasized this approach, but more than half mentioned it and for those who did it tended to be their first and strongest recommendation.

Ritu Vincent said,

What’s been most impactful for me is having a lot of people who I think of as mentors, usually friends, former manag...

Performative leadership.

Earlier this year, I realized that I had been using the term “performative” incorrectly. This led to an interesting discussion, with Laura sharing the proper definition, and Julia pointing out that literally no one uses the term as it’s “properly” defined. I’d thought it meant “an action taken purely for show without real value”, but the intended, theory definition is closer to “when using language to name something is an act of change or creation” such as saying “I do” in a marriage or “You are...

The Grand Migration.

Shortly after a senior leader joins a new company, you’ll often notice them steer the organization towards a total architectural rewrite. Perhaps this is a switch from batch to streaming computation, from monolith to services, or adopting a new programming language. If you take a few minutes to reflect, I bet you can identify several times where you’ve had this experience.

Regardless of the proposed technical change, it’s almost always coupled with the promise of fixing a broad swath of organiz...

Promotion pathologies.

As I was working on the Staff promotion packets article,
I originally included a section on "Promotion pathologies" to (attempt to) avoid when
going up for a promotion to a staff-plus engineering role, but
it ended up making the article less cohesive so I scrapped it there
and have pulled it out here as a separate post.

I've written about some of the weird emergent behavior around promotions,
but didn't address how some recurring tropes often derail individual promotion nominations.

The themes...

Staff promotion packets.

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com.

Some folks think of their promotion packet as the capstone of reaching a Staff-pus role, but I’ve seen many folks succeed by taking an opposite approach: starting to write their first Staff promotion packet long before they think they’re likely to be promoted to Staff, much the way they might use a brag document. Used this way, your packet becomes the map to accomplishing your goal.

It’s likely your company will have its own format for promotion packets,...

The Saint-Exupéry of metrics.

Recently we were working on the engineering section of Calm's
monthly All Hands meeting, and were trying to fit a recap of the past
six months, and our plan for the following six months, into a seven minute slot.

Folks at Calm are frequent users of the Calm app, so it's quick
to explain our user-facing work, but we weren't quite as sure how to
bottle up the spirit of some of our technical investments
with roughly thirty seconds per project and a
full-company audience who hadn't necessarily hear...

Some common hiring manager mistakes.

There’s a lot to say about hiring, and I’ve written a fair amount about it, but as I was chatting with a few folks over the past couple weeks, I realized one thing I haven’t written about is the frequent mistakes or challenges that new hiring managers often encounter
and sometimes struggle with.

If you’re just starting to think about hiring, focus on your hiring funnel first, but if you’re finding hiring to be a challenge, think through whether you’re running into one of these problems.

Not g...

Customizing screen and screenrc.

While my professional development has moved to VSCode
(and don't get me wrong, I write effectively zero code
as a CTO), I still do my personal work in a combination
of Screen, Emacs and shell commands.
I recently bought a new home computer to replace my aging iMac,
and decdied to try something different: what if I left auto-update enabled
instead of clicking "Remind me tomorrow" every day until this computer, too,
is replaced?

This has been going well, except that I usually have two to three pr...