An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

don’t treat growth as a foregone conclusion. Growth only comes from change, and that is something you can influence.

I’ve personally found that customization matters less than I assumed, because people mostly choose to respond based on their circumstances, not on the quality of your note.

the single clearest indicator of strong recruiting organizations is a close, respectful partnership between the recruiting and engineering functions.

Most companies do either annual or biannual performance cycles, although it’s not unheard of to do them quarterly. The overhead of running a cycle tends to be fairly heavy, which leads companies to do them less frequently. Conversely, the feedback from the cycle tends to be very important, and it serves as a primary input into factors that individuals care about a great deal, like compensation, so there is also countervailing pressure to do them frequently.

Something that has stuck with me from my front-end experience was feeling treated as a second-tier engineer: coworkers were unwilling to do any front-end work, but were careful to categorize it as trivial.

As you move away from generalized roles and toward specialists, an unexpected consequence is that your organization has far more single points of failure.

Recruiting rare humans. For entirely great reasons, people want the first hires they make into a new role to be strong role models for the entire function. This often leads to a proliferation of requirements until it’s impossible for any candidate to pass the bar.

avoid reusing stuff that you know doesn’t work, and instead approach the matter from first principles with creativity. Then keep iterating based on how it works for candidates!

The system-to-administrator ratio is commonly used as a rough metric to understand administrative costs in high-scale services.