Will Larson's Blog, page 9

Thesis on value accumulation in AI.

Recently, I’ve thinking about where I want to focus my angel investing in 2024,and decided to document my thinking about value accumulation in artificial intelligencebecause it explains the shape of my interest–or lack thereof–in investing in artificialintelligence tooling. I’ll describe my understanding of the current state, how I think it’llevolve over the next 1-3 years, and then end with how that shapes what I’m investing in.

My view on the the state of play today:

There are three funda...

High-Context Triad.

The past couple weeks I’ve been working on three semi-related articles that I think of as the “High Context Triad.” Those are Layers of context, Navigating ambiguity, and Tradeoffs are multi-dimensional. One of my background projects, probably happening in 2025 or 2026 after I’ve finished my nascent project on engineering strategy, is publishing a second edition of Staff Engineer, and I intended these three articles as supplements.

I’ve really enjoyed writing these pieces, because the first on c...

Useful tradeoffs are multi-dimensional.

In some pockets of the industry, an axiom of software development is that deploying software quickly is at odds with thoroughly testing that software. One reason that teams believe this is because a fully automated deployment process implies that there’s no opportunity for manual quality assurance. In other pockets of the industry, the axiom is quite different: you can get both fast deployment and manual quality assurance by using feature flags to decouple deployment (shipping the code) and rele...

Navigating ambiguity.

Perceiving the layers of context in problems will unlock another stage of career progression as a Staff-plus engineer, but there’s at least one essential skill to develop afterwards: navigating ambiguity. In my experience, navigating deeply ambiguous problems is the rarest skill in engineers, and doing it well is a rarity. It’s sufficiently rare that many executives can’t do it well either, although I do believe that all long-term successful executives find at least one toolkit for these kinds o...

Layers of context.

Recently I was chatting with a Staff-plus engineer who was struggling to influence his peers. Each time he suggested an approach, his team agreed with him, but his peers in the organization disagreed and pushed back. He wanted advice on why his peers kept undermining his approach.After our chat, I followed up by talking with his peers about some recent disagreements, and they kept highlighting missing context from the engineer’s proposals.As I spoke with more peers, the engineer’s problem beca...

Those five spare hours each week.

One of the recurring debates about senior engineering leadership roles is whether Chief Technology Officers should actively write code. There are a lot of strongly held positions, from “Real CTOs code.” at one end of the spectrum, to “Low ego managers know they contribute more by focusing on leadership work rather than coding.” There are, of course, adherents at every point between those two extremes. It’s hard to take these arguments too seriously, because these values correlate so strongly wit...

Predictability.

Right now I’m reading Michael S. Malone’s The Big Score, and one thing that I love about it is how much it believes that key individuals drive and create industries. It’s an infectious belief, and a necessary one to write a concise, coherent narrative story about the origins of Silicon Valley. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot as well in my career, and also while writing on my upcoming book on operating as an engineering executive–how much do good executives really matter?

My ego’s too fra...

2023 in review.

Previously: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

This was an eventful year. My son went to preschool,I joined Carta, left Calm, and wrote my third book.It was also a logistically intensive year, with our toddler heading to preschool,more work travel, and a bunch of other little bits and pieces.Here is my year in review summary.

I love to read other folks year-in writeups – if you write one, please send it my way!

Goals

Evaluating my goals for the year:

[Completed] Write at least four good bl...

Notes on How Big Things Get Done

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner is a fascinating look at why some megaprojects fail so resoundingly and why others succeed under budget and under schedule. It’s an exploration of planning methods, the role of expertise, the value of benchmarking similar projects, and much more. Not directly software engineering related, but very relevant to the work. Also, just well written.

“Think slow, act fast”

It’s fine for planning to be slow (p17), as long as delivery is fast.Eac...

Writers who operate.

Occasionally folks tell me that I should “write full time.” I’ve thought about this a lot, and have rejected that option because I believe that writers who operate (e.g. write concurrently with holding a non-writing industry role) are best positioned to keep writing valuable work that advances the industry.This is a lightly controversial view, so I wanted to pull together my full set of thoughts on the topic.

The themes I want to work through are:

Evaluating believability for operators is much...