Will Larson's Blog, page 6

How to get more headcount.

One of the recurring challenges that teams face is getting headcount to support their initiatives.A similar problem is the idea that a team can’t get a favored project into their roadmap.In both cases, teams often create a story about how clueless executives don’t understand whytheir work is important.

I understand why dumb executives are such an appealing explanation to problems: it fits perfectly into theKarpman drama triangle bymaking executives the villian and the team the victim, but I...

Navigating Private Equity ownership.

In 2020, you could credibly argue that ZIRP explains the world,but that’s an impossible argument to make in 2024 when zero-interest rate policy is only a fond memory.Instead, we’re seeing a number of companies designed for rapid expansion learning to adaptto a world that expects immediate free cash flow rather than accepting the sweet promise of discounted future cash flow.

This chapter wants to tackle that problem head-on, taking the role of an engineering organization attempting to navigate...

Using systems modeling to refine strategy.

While I was probably late to learn the conceptof strategy testing,I might have learned about systems modeling too early in my career,stumbling on Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primerbefore I began my career in software.Over the years, I’ve discovered a number of ways to miuse systems modeling,but it remains the most effective, flexible tool I’ve found to debugging complex problems.

In this chapter, we’ll work through:

when systems model is a useful technique, and when it’s bette...

Eng org seniority-mix model.

One of the trademarks of private equity ownership is the expectation that either the company maintains their current marginand grows revenue at 25-30%, or they instead grow slower and increase their free cash flow year over year.In many organizations, engineering costs have a major impact on their free cash flow.There are many costs to reduce, cloud hosting and such, but inevitably part of the discussion isaddressing engineering headcount costs directly.

One of the largest contributors to en...

Modeling driving onboarding.

The How should you adopt LLMs? strategy explores how Theoretical Ride Sharingmight adopt LLMs. It builds on several models, the first is about LLMs impact on Developer Experience.The second model, documented here, looks at whether LLMs might improve a core product and business problem: maximizingactive drivers on their ridesharing platform.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

Where the model of ridesharing drivers identifies opportunities for LLMsHow the model was sketched and developed using let...

Modeling impact of LLMs on Developer Experience.

In How should you adopt Large Language Models? (LLMs), we considered howLLMs might impact a company’s developer experience. To support that exploration, I’ve developed a system model ofthe developing software at the company.

In this chapter, we’ll work through:

Summary results from this modelHow the model was developed, both sketching and building the model in a spreadsheet.(As discussed in the overview of systems modeling,I generally would recommend against using spreadsheets to develop m...

Testing strategy: avoid the waterfall strategy trap with iterative refinement.

If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be thatprematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective.Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe yourstrategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive)or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). Neither is particular helpful.

While some strategies are ...

Should we decompose our monolith?

From their first introduction in 2005, the debate between adoptinga microservices architecture, a monolithic service architecture, or a hybrid between the two, has become one of theleast-reversible decisions that most engineering organizations make.Even migrating to a different database technology is generally a less expensive change than moving from monolithto microservices or from microservices to monolith.

The industry has in many ways gone full circle on that debate, from most hyperscale...

Executive translation.

One of my most unexpectedly controversial postsis Extract the Kernel, which arguesthat executives are generally directionally correct but specifically wrong,and it’s your job to understand the overarching direction without gettingdistracted by the narrow errors in their idea.

Some executives are skeptical of this idea because they don’t like the implicationthat they’re usually wrong, but they weren’t the audience that was offended.But the folks who got particularly upset were non-executive...

Video of Developing Eng Leadership Styles.

The last chapter I wrote for Eng Executive’s Primer was this one about developing engineering leadership styles.It’s an interesting chapter to me peronally, precisely because it’s not something I would have agreed with or written five years ago.

This past Friday I gave a conference talk on this topic at LeadingEng New York, 2024.If you’re interested, you can watch a recording of an earlier practice session from a few days before the talk,and can review the slides.I think that the practice se...