Will Larson's Blog, page 30

Hotspotting developer productivity.

Late last year I had coffee with Keith Adams, and we ended up chatting a bunch about migrations in the context of making it easier to extend an unruly codebase. The discussion went in a bunch of directions, including chatting a bit about Building Evolutionary Architecture. One idea that Keith mentioned in that discussion has particularly stuck with me: most changes happen in the same handful of files, and those files are the most effective place to invest into quality improvement.

I believe...

vtt-compactor: slightly less verbose VTT files.

I'm working on a small project that involves interviewing a number of folks to capture their experience becoming and working as a Staff engineer. Hopefully the first stories will be ready to post in a couple of weeks, but what I've been surprised by is just how tricky it can be to get good interview notes.

So far Zoom's record meeting has been phenomenal because it produces a text transcript in the VTT format that's extremely "good enough" to edit into an interview. However, the format is a...

Resources for Staff-plus engineers.

When I was working on Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering, one of the most valuable things I did was build a list of resources for folks (especially me) to continue their learning and exploration.

Recently, I’ve been focused on the question of “What does it mean to be a Staff or Staff-plus engineer, and how do you get there?”, and have gathered this collection of resources for folks who are looking to grow as or into such roles.

Your Network

Almost unanimously Staff-plus engineers’...

From one to two: how to start a successful distributed engineering office.

Recently it feels like companies are moving beyond the single office model earlier and earlier in the lifetime. Maybe it’s improvements in video conferencing, perhaps it’s the increasing costs of operating in Silicon Valley, perhaps it’s just a fad, but in any case, effectively supporting additional company offices is an important and increasingly core skill for engineering leaders.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with several distributed offices, founding SocialCode’s San Francisco office...

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...