Will Larson's Blog, page 28

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...

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...

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...

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...