Will Larson

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About Will Larson
Will Larson has been an engineering leader and software engineer at technology companies of many shapes and sizes including Calm, Stripe, and Uber. He grew up in North Carolina, studied Computer Science at Centre College in Kentucky, spent a year in Japan on the JET Program teaching English, and has been living in San Francisco since 2009. He writes frequently on his blog, Irrational Exuberance, at lethain.com.
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Blog postI’ve been in a handful of discussions over the past few weeks about plagiarization: how should authors approach their work being directly or indirectly copied?
When I started writing online in 2007, I was writing to learn to write, and my early stuff showed that, by which I mean it wasn’t very good. I mostly documented stuff I was learning in Django like creating a middleware for Google Analytics (please don’t follow any advice in that article: it’s 15 years out of date) or setting up6 days ago Read more -
Blog postI recently got an email about moving into an engineering management role too early in the email writer’s career:
I became an engineering manager two years ago, which was also two years into my career. The reason is mainly that we were a small team and when the time came to add line management I was around and down for it. I have loved this position, and find it extremely fulfilling to be able to remain technical and still have a deeply human job and build strong relationships with my1 week ago Read more -
Blog postWhen I was a young boy, a cousin gifted me a copy of Steely Dan’s greatest hits. In that era of CDs and 56k baud modems, I didn’t have much new music to play, and over the summer I listened to that CD enough that bits and pieces come back to me despite not knowingly listening to a Steely Dan song in at least 25 years. One song in particular, Black Cow, has a lyric that occasionally comes to mind, “You should know / How all the pros play the game / You change your name.”
The lyric come2 weeks ago Read more -
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Blog postChatting with a friend recently, their company was running into a common developer productivity pitfall. The company had mandated a migration away from their monolithic architecture and mono repo, but the migration was stalling out. To speed up the transition, the responsible infrastructure team decided to stop supporting the monolith and instead focus on the new service environment. Two years later, engineers were quitting to avoid working on either side of the migration: both the new, incom3 weeks ago Read more
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Blog postThis is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth.
After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do next. I was torn between two different paths: (1) leading engineering at a very small startup, or (2) taking a much smaller role at a fast growing company, with the expecta4 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postWith the recent news of Twitter’s board accepting Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, some folks are talking about leaving Twitter. In the long scheme of things, being founded in 2006 makes Twitter a young company, but the internet is different and over the past 16 years it’s become a central platform for many folks working in the technology field (among many others). Twitter has become especially important for folks writing content online, to the extent that it’s the most effective distributio1 month ago Read more
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Blog postOne of my favorite parts of senior leadership roles is that you periodically get to deep dive on something that you typically don’t focus on too closely. At Stripe, I got to serve as the interim leader of the Payments Infrastructure organization for a few months, which gave me the chance to support a couple hundred additional folks working in an adjacent area of the company, while also continuing to support the Foundation organization I worked with throughout my time there. I learned a dispro1 month ago Read more
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Blog postI took some time and cleaned up my writing backlog of “topics to write about” and pulling them into this post. Let me know if any topics sound particularly helpful, or if I have any particularly good stories that I’ve forgotten to mention here.
Stories recounting interesting times of my career or life, although inevitably the very best stories are tricky to talk about in public, like these previous stories:
“From ten to 2,000 services: the Uber provisioning.” Lightly touched on in1 month ago Read more -
Blog postRecently, I got an email from someone asking about Stripe’s approach to product-led, developer-centric growth. If you really want a unique insight into Stripe, you’re undoubtedly better off reading Stripe’s 2021 update, but here are my general notes on Stripe as a microcosm of product-led, developer-centric growth.
from Sequoia's The Market Curve
A good place to start this journey is with the market curve, with this one specifically from Sequoia, which segments companies by th1 month ago Read more -
Blog postRecently I got an interesting question from someone looking for resources for Engineering Directors, as distinct from general engineering management:
I was wondering if you’ve written any posts geared towards engineering directors or have any recs for posts others have written I’m mainly looking for advice on how to manage projects from two layers away. How do I give managers creative freedom to manage however they like while also stressing the importance of deadlines?
A few b1 month ago Read more -
Blog postOver the past few years I’ve gotten into the unhelpful habit of checking Twitter search to see if folks have mentioned my writing. I don’t actually do anything with that though, beyond perhaps leaving a “like”. I enjoy using Twitter, but this part of how I use Twitter is just an unhelpful habit to waste time, so I wanted to try automating it away.
I got started by creating a new Twitter Developer account, and then wrote up a simple script, github repository, and github action in letha2 months ago Read more -
Blog postThis is an exerpt from Infrastructure Engineer’s section on efficiency.
Before diving into the mechanics of managing infrastructure costs, the first question to answer is whether it’s a valuable use of organizational time to make your current infrastructure spend more efficient. How you think about this will vary a bit depending on whether your company is early-stage, prioritizing growth or profitability.
Early-Stage Generally speaking, very early-stage companies shouldn’t spe2 months ago Read more -
Blog postAt a recent Engineering Q&A session, I spoke a bit about the idea of an innovation budget. We’ll accomplish more in the long-term if we protect some space for innovation in addition to maintaining our focus on immediate goals. That sounds great, someone noted in chat, but what did I even mean when I kept talking about innovation?
There are a lot of ways to think about innovation, but for me I always start with the idea of a hill climbing algorithm. You’re at a point in a two dimen2 months ago Read more -
Blog postManaging teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled change poorly, and I picked up the reputation for being difficult to manage.
I’d like to say that I learned from my mistakes directly, but the honest version is that I c2 months ago Read more -
Blog postThis is my newest project, Infrastructure Engineer. You can also join the mailing list.
From late 2019 through early 2021, most of my creative output was focused on StaffEng, along with the overlapping book, Staff Engineer. I learned a lot working on that project, and it’s doing respectable numbers. I haven’t done much on that project in the past six months, and I spent some time over the Christmas holidays thinking about what I want to work on next. I write on this blog to capture wh3 months ago Read more -
Blog postThis is an early version of a chapter for Infrastructure Engineering.
Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team.
Later on, things are easy as well. You have seventy engineers spread across eight to ten mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive teams3 months ago Read more -
Blog postSee this post’s code on Github.
My mother works with a food pantry and recently they have an interesting logistical challenge: they get nearly free meat donated from another non-profit, but can only order it after the other non-profit updates their website and need to order it somewhat immediately (within a few hours) of the website’s updates. This sort of thing is a tractable problem if you’re comfortable working in a modern business environment, there are a bunch of vendors that mon3 months ago Read more -
Blog postEllen Chisa has a new newsletter on product management, and I particularly enjoyed this week’s piece on 34 Product Lessons. The bullet of advice that resonated with me most deeply was:
25. When you’re promoted to VP Product, the best thing you can do is make sure to call an experienced VP Product once every week to say “is this normal?” Amazing advice gifted to me by Leland Rechis. The job is so different that it just helps to have someone to talk it through with.
This connect3 months ago Read more -
Blog postA few days ago, I got to have a delightful chat with Katie Wilde, digging into a question that we’ve both found difficult to answer: what distinguishes managers perceived to have good judgment from those perceived to have bad judgment? In exploring that question, the topic of mental models came up frequently.
Mental model is a somewhat overloaded term, but roughly means having a structured view on a given topic. This structured view allows you to predict how changes will propagate acr4 months ago Read more -
Blog postHaving spent a fair amount of time giving hiring process advice, I wanted to collect my hiring advice into a single index. Read through until you find a section that applies for you, and then read that.
If you don’t have an interview process with consistent interviews and interviewers, read Designing interview loops If you’re not sure where your loop is having issues, read Your hiring funnel and Modeling a hiring funnel with Systems library If managers are responsible for sourcing candida4 months ago Read more
Titles By Will Larson
$23.67
At most technology companies, you'll reach Senior software engineer, the career level for software engineers, in five to eight years. At the career level, your company's career ladder won't require that you work towards the next promotion; being promoted further is an exception rather than expected. This is also when many engineers are first given an opportunity to move into engineering management. Over the past few years, we've seen a flurry of books unlocking the engineering management career path, like Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager, Lara Hogan's Resilient Management, and even my own An Elegant Puzzle. The engineering management career isn't an easy one, but there are maps available to help navigate it. What if you want to advance your career without becoming an engineering manager? The technical leadership path remains relatively undocumented, hard to navigate, and inconsistent across companies. Staff Engineer is your guide to building your career towards a Staff engineering role, receiving the title, and succeeding within the role.
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
May 28, 2019
by
Will Larson
$9.99
There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies.
Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.
Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.