Will Larson's Blog, page 27
July 26, 2020
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...
July 12, 2020
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 ...
July 7, 2020
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...
June 28, 2020
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...
June 23, 2020
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...
June 20, 2020
Stuff I've learned about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion over the past few years.
When I wrote An Elegant Puzzle, I wanted to document some of the structured ways I’d learned to foster inclusion within the organizations, which surfaced in a number of sections, including Opportunity & Membership, Selecting project leads, Inclusion in the first shift, and Work the policy, not the exceptions.
Those pieces continue to reflect my values, but they often operated on an aspirational level without acknowledging the grittier, more ambiguous layers beneath the ideals where you spend mo...
How to practice backend engineering.
On a recent call, I chatted with someone about backend roles in software engineering, and what folks actually do in those roles. More than just what do these folks do, how would you practice for this kind of role or prepare for interviews?
Roughly the sorts of work that backend engineers are asked to take on versus the work that any engineer might be asked to take on, three categories of tasks stand out to me as being both frequent and practicable:
Modeling and remodeling data - how do you de...
June 18, 2020
Trapped in a Values Oasis.
Learning to influence without authority is the keystone leadership skill to transition from early to mid career. It becomes an even more important skill later in your career as you need to partner effectively with your peers, executives and board members.
One of my favorite approaches to influencing without authority is “Model, document and share”, which focuses on enacting changes within your aegis of authority, while making sure it’s easy for others beyond your authority to adopt your changes...
June 14, 2020
My career story.
As I’ve had more early career folks reach out about mentorship, the most frequent question has been about my technology career story. I genuinely don’t think my story is a good one to learn from because I’ve walked a path dependent on a great deal of privilege and luck. That said, at some point it’s easier to simply write the story and let folks decide that for themselves.
In telling my story here, I’ve centered on the role of privilege and luck, with the hope that it steers folks away from try...
