Will Larson's Blog, page 26

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...

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...