Will Larson's Blog, page 28

Mentoring from privilege.

A couple weeks ago, Sean Page tweeted
to match engineering and product manager mentors with BIPOC mentees.
I’m amazed at the ability of the internet to create these sort of special congregations,
and raised my hand.
A good number of folks reached out asking if I’d mentor them,
and as I started trying to respond to them, I realized I needed to spend more time trying to understand a few core questions:

How can I be a valuable mentor?
How can I mentor from a position of privilege without causing...

Ways I'm available to help.

tl;dr - email me at lethain[at]gmail

Thinking about how I can be a helpful person in the world, as well as the sorts of folks who do and don't think to ask for help, I wanted to take some time to explicitly write down ways that I’m available to help folks on the internet that I don't have a preexisting relationship with. This is an initial list that I’ll have to think about expanding over time.

First, some things I’m not a good resource for:

Getting your first job in tech. My path into tec...

Black Lives Matter.

Redlining map of Asheville from Mapping Inequality.

Last Wednesday evening I was (virtually) at an event that started with a silent moment in the memory of George Floyd. I wasn’t expecting it but appreciated the moment before it moved on to other topics. That silent moment came back to me the next morning, and threw into sharp contrast the extent that George Floyd’s death simply didn’t exist within the communities where I spend the majority of my time.

His death didn’t exist in my spaces in th...

To lead, you have to follow.

Years ago, the company I was working with hired a new Director of Engineering, and the CTO was talking about why the new Director was an amazing hire. The new Director’s clinching accomplishment? The best ever explanation of the distinction between leadership and management. This turned out not to be a particularly effective way to evaluate hires, but it is an interesting topic.

Defining leadership and management is such heavily trod terrain that it’s hard to add much to it, but roughly managem...

The rush to "show value."

Some years back I had the strangest meeting in my career. Andrew (not real name) was my new manager, it was his first day on the job, and we were having the standard get to know you one-on-one meeting. My outgoing manager and I had been heavily involved in assessing and hiring Andrew, his interview performance was excellent, and I was legitimately excited to work together. So I was surprised when Andrew sat down, cradled his head in his hands, and lamented how much he regretted taking the...

April updates for StaffEng.

On March 19th, I posted How do folks reach Staff Engineer?, and began posting stories of folks reaching and operating at the Staff Engineer level every Tuesday and Thursday.

The first was from Keavy McMinn, and yesterday the tenth went up from Silvia Botros. Every story has gotten a good number of reads, with Keavy's doing quite well, along with those from Duretti Hirpa and Michelle Bu. The mailing list for StaffEng.com has gone from zero to a bit over 1,300. Yuan Liu also wrote his story on...

Picking problems for programming interviews.

Someone recently send me a note asking about whether their internal process for interviewing Staff engineers was a good one. They were particularly concerned that they were encountering a number of Staff-plus engineers who were struggling to write code for finding palindromes or reversing an array.

There is an oral tradition of programmers who simply cannot program, captured back in 2007 when Imran Ghory coined the idea of Fizzbuzz problems, along with the most canonical Fizzbuzz question:

...

Minding our stories.

If you took a minute to think back and pick your favorite conference talk, I have no idea what it was about, but I bet the talk was designed to tell a story. Likewise, I bet your favorite book, even if its non-fiction, is lanced through by a crisp, continuous narrative. If you wanted to explain your best or worst job, I bet youd start by telling a story that captures the experience.

Humans love stories, which makes stories a powerful medium of communication, and like all powerful things, they...

Testing Python projects for Google Cloud Run.

I've been using GCP's Cloud Run for a handful of projects recently, including staffeng.com, and have generally been really pleased with it. Now that I'm familiar with it, I can get all of this working for a new Python project in about twenty minutes:

New private Github repository Build triggers for Google Cloud Build that automatically start when a new commit to master branch is pushed to Github Those triggers build a Dockerfile in the repository and upload it to Google's container registry...

Staff engineer archetypes.

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com

Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply better against populations than people. In the case of Staff-plus engineers, career ladders paper over a number of distinct roles clustered under a single moniker.

The more folks I spoke with, the...