Will Larson's Blog, page 27

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...

Create space for others.

One of the best measures of your long-term success as a Staff-plus engineer is that the organization around you increasingly benefits from, but doesn’t rely upon, your contributions. Because many folks reach their first Staff-plus role by being the “go to” person for the organization, it can be a difficult transition from essential to adjacent.

This transition requires learning to deliberately create space for the team around you, and comes down to actively involving them in discussions, decisi...

Staff-plus interview processes.

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com

When we talk about designing a Staff-plus engineer interview loop, the first thing to talk about is that absolutely no one is confident their Staff-plus interview loop works well. Many loops end up looking for a senior engineer who’s really fast at solving problems, which doesn’t reflect the actual role. Others focus on communication skills, which are a key part of the role but certainly not the entirety of it. A few companies even construct their process ...

External office hours.

While I was taking some time to rest before starting at Calm, one day I had an appointment downtown and decided to run an experiment to see if I could grab coffee and lunch with folks I didn’t know. The day before I typed up a tweet asking if anyone would be interested in meeting.

I was a bit surprised to learn that other folks do this semi-regularly, with Kellan naming these Office Hours. I was more surprised that this worked. I had about fifteen folks reach out, and end up meeting with four f...

Does the Staff title even matter?

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com

If you’re safely nestled within the comfortable clutches of the Senior Engineer career level, you might wonder if you ought to pursue the Staff title. It’s a considerable investment of time and energy, along with requiring a good amount of luck, is that investment worth your time?

The answer is, of course, that it might be! The four consistent advantages that generally come with a Staff-plus title are:

allowing you to bypass informal gauges of seniority...

Where do Staff-plus engineers fit into the org?

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com

When I work on the organization design of an engineering organization, I think a lot about “organizational mathematics”, the guideline that each team should have one manager and six to eight engineers, and each manager of managers should support four to six managers. From those numbers you can rapidly determine an appropriate structure for your organization that’ll work fairly well. It might not be perfect, but it’ll work.

As I’ve applied that approach to...

StaffEng Updates, June 2020

I'm on parental leave for four weeks (after which Laurel and I are siwtching off,
she'll be taking a bit and then I'll be taking more later when she returns to work),
and in addition to learning
how to change diapers, read hunger cues, exist in a world of constant sleep deprivation,
and starting to educate myself on systemtic racism,
I also wanted to push forward a couple of lingering projects, one of which was
StaffEng.

What's changed:

staffeng.com is now a Gatsby site served as a Github Pag...