Staff Engineering (ft. Will Larson, CTO of Calm)

Career Chats with Swyx and Randall

What happens after you go past Senior? Will Larson, CTO of Calm, has been interviewing Staff-plus engineers across the industry for his new book, Staff Engineering.

This is our first full-length interview podcast episode! If you enjoyed it, please help us share with a friend and let us know your feedback! (Links at bottom)

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1:00 Why research Staff Engineering?

• Most bigcos make up their ladders as they go along, or cargo cult from FB/Google.
• We have to separate management from leadership.

4:31 Who are Will's role models?

• Lara Hogan - the Voltron Manager
• Julia Evans' Wizard Zines
• Tanya Reilly - Being Glue
• Dan Na - Pushing Through Friction
• Julia Grace, Director of Eng at Apple: "Don't play team sports alone, you'll lose."
  • The Staff level is a leadership role, you don't get promoted on the basis of your work alone.

11:08 How do you find someone to help you grow?

• 3 types: Role Models, Mentors, and Sponsors
• Sponsors: Lara Hogan on Sponsorship
• The key question: "Do I need to develop myself" or "Is the company evaluating my work fairly"?
• Mentors: Some mentors give generic answers, others know your specific context. The second one is harder.
• Role Models: Helps you know someone with your background can accomplish something. Lighthouse hires are important as proof.
• Retention is most important here
• Look externally on Twitter and on StaffEng.com
  • Duretti Hirpa at Mailchimp
  • Ras Kasa Williams at Mailchimp
  • Michelle Bu at Stripe
• The best people may not be writing online

16:30 Being Visible

• Books are bought, not sold
• If you aren't visible, your work won't be valued.

18:12 Career Management

• Most people don't manage their careers at all
• Most companies are set up to assume Fungible Developers which is exactly what you don't want to be
• But also blaming your manager is a self limiting belief. You personally have to be managing your own career.
• Write your own promotion packets on an ongoing basis.
• Julia Evans on Brag Documents
• Tip: Make your own achievements channel in Slack and log all that info for later

20:39 Architects - How do you lead without authority?

• Silvia Botros at Twilio
• Katie Sylor-Miller at Etsy
• Spend a huge amount of time soaking up context
• Reduce communication and coordination costs
• We rarely understand the problems we are solving when we design the solution
• One directional communication doesn't work - gathering context and providing a common interface helps solves this
• Architects are powerful bc they are aligned with their engineers, Managers have to align with their orgs
• Similar to a Product Manager role - all of the responsibility, none of the authority

24:37 Solvers and Matching Archetypes to Company Stage

• Opposite of Architects? It depends on the company's approach - do they plan and then ship, or do they ship and learn. Architects cannot function in the second type.
• 4 archetypes: Team Leads, Architects, Solvers, and Right Hands.
• Calm is all Team Leads - the majority of the value is not in operating or creating infrastructure - it is in creating product
• It's pointless to bias too much to Architect or Right Hand early on
• You don't see Right Hands except at much bigger companies - for scaling out

29:10 What should Senior Engineers know about Systems Thinking?

• Will Larson's Intro to Systems Thinking
• https://github.com/lethain/systems
• Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
• Engineers should have both an abstract Systems Thinker and a practical Solver toolkit
• Incident programs overfocus on compliance rather than remediation
• Incidents -> Response -> Review -> Management (catalog, tag) -> Remediation
• Don't focus on moving from stage to stage

32:33 Metrics: The subtle art of Measuring Engineer Productivity

• Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations
• 1. Delivery lead time
• 2. Deployment frequency
• 3. Change fail rate (defect rate)
• 4. Time to restore service
• How they dynamically run tests to improve productivity at Stripe

36:30 Career Advice

• Will Larson's Career Advice
• Think about the teams you've worked with with the highest density of people you want to be working with
• Yahoo story
• Digg v4 story - your network will outlast your job
• Your manager and team matters more than the company

Thanks for listening!

Speaker Links

- Will Larson (@lethain): Blog, An Elegant Puzzle, StaffEng.com
- Randall (@randallkanna): The Standout Developer
- Swyx (@swyx): The Coding Career Handbook
- Podcast Episode discussion on Circle