Will Larson's Blog, page 30

Interviewing senior engineering leaders.

A friend recently reached out for advice on interviewing and hiring senior engineering leaders. I’ve spent a good deal of time on this topic over the last couple years, starting with partnering with Laura Hilton to design Stripe’s interview loops for engineering leadership, and more recently going through a search for my own role. Leadership hiring is particularly interesting as a window into an organization’s psychology: for the highest stake decisions, do they turn to structure or to...

Mailbag: Evolving your engineer career beyond the career level.

Recently I got an email asking about evolving your engineering career after you’ve hit the career level, but before you feel like you’ve accomplished what’s important to you. Here's the lightly edited email:

I'm a mid-career engineer with experience in the technical, management, and leadership tracks. I find it challenging to continue leveling up. I'm working on it, reading articles and books, but it's hard, sometimes, to know what to do next. My network in the Bay Area is small because I...

Crowdsourcing CTO/VPE learning circles.

As part of moving into a CTO role, I wanted to take a stab at putting together learning circles for folks in CTO, VP Engineering and Staff+ Engineer roles. This is the sort of thing I’ve done internally within a company before, but most companies only have one CTO or function-leading VP Engineering, so this sort of learning circle needed to happen beyond the scope of a single company.

I’ve been playing around with the idea that you can use a sufficiently-large Twitter community to unlock...

Do you work at a tech company?

The most unnatural stage of hiring someone is when you’ve extended an offer, know they have other offers, and you are trying to give them advice on which offer to take. The obvious answer is that they should your offer, but you end up in some interesting discussions toeing the line between objectivity and outcome. Typically the offer numbers are already out in the open, so the topics tend to get more abstract. I recently had one of these discussions that hinged on an unexpected question, “...

Share stories, not advice.

A few years ago I was trying to figure out how to incorporate product management techniques into infrastructure engineering, and I had the very good fortune of having Astrid Atkinson answer a few of my questions. I explained a challenge I was having and asked for her advice, and was surprised when instead of answering Astrid asked, “May I share a story?”

While I was surprised by that response, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on it, and have tried to copy it. These days I try to share...

How to partner with an executive assistant.

One of the magic moments you’ll experience as a senior leader is the first time you get support from an executive assistant. Starting at that moment you’ll slowly uncover more and more possibilities that you had – in order to preserve your sanity – intentionally blinded yourself to. It is, you’ll gradually relearn, actually possible to reschedule large meetings, get all those one-off meeting requests scheduled in a timely fashion, and to plan good offsites that bring the team...

Example Call For Proposals submissions.

I was chatting with a couple folks recently about submitting a talk proposal to TheLeadDev, and it reminded me of something that used to prevent me from submitting talks: I had no idea what a good Call For Proposal submission looked like.

At Stripe, both Julia Evans and Amy Nguyen were kind enough to host recurring sessions where they helped folks craft their first submission for a tech conference CFPs, which – to the best of my memory – resulted in every one of those talks...

Joining Calm.

Today is a particularly exciting day because I can finally stop telling folks that I’m joining a new role, and instead say that I’ve started a new role, and in particular that I’ve joined Calm to serve as their CTO. I’ve written a few words here, will update my Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, and then it’s time to get to work on my first ninety days.

Deciding to embark on a new endeavor is never easy, so I wouldn’t say that deciding to join Calm was easy! It took a good deal of reflection on...

Some rough notes on running learning circles.

I’m experimenting with putting together a couple of learning circles, and someone who wants to run a similar program within their company reached out for advice on structuring groups for success. I’ve organized a couple and participated in a couple others, but honestly I don’t think I have a great handle on best practices here, but I’ll jot down what I’ve learned nonetheless as a reusable, referenceable artifact.

Groups require maintenance and attention to succeed, this means having an...

How to build your company's engineering brand.

If you end up working in an engineering team that wants to accelerate hiring, at some point you’ll hear the dreaded statement, “We need to grow our eng brand.” The method to accomplish that aim isn’t always clear, but the goal: what can we do so that candidates enter our process thinking highly of our engineering efforts?

After participating in a couple of eng brand kickoffs, a common playbook starts to emerge. Since that playbook often gets recreated across each company, I wanted to take...