Will Larson
CTO, Imprint. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveauthorengineerinvestor@Lethain ↗LinkedIn ↗lethain.com ↗
Will Larson is a software leader who has headed engineering organizations at Digg, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Carta, and Imprint. He is known for his technology blog and books on engineering leadership, including An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer.
2shows
2appearances
53statements
3resolved
2supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Will Larson said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Larson: Carta gives EM and PM pairs the same performance rating
“The chief product officer Bruchali and I like spend a fair amount of time, like calibrating together and making sure, like, again, there's cases where there's like an exception, right? Cause there's like clear, clear issues happening for someone, but on averag…”
Larson: Write a few great essays rather than starting a newsletter
“I tell people if you just want to like write something that is going to help advance your career, you should really focus on writing like two or three really good things and spend a ton of time drafting, revising, getting feedback. You just focus on making lik…”
Larson: Ground-up software rewrites never work out for anyone
“This is a decision that never works out for anyone.”
Tech companies dodged engineering resource allocation for a decade through overhiring
“One challenge of the last decade, right, is that resource allocation was largely dodged by many companies because they just Decided to spend more and hire more folks. And so oftentimes the real constraint was, like, hiring velocity on a given team and your abi…”
Believing engineering managers shouldn't get into technical details is an anti-pattern
“I think one of the lessons in management over the last decade has been that You know, managers are people leaders in that it is micromanagement that it is bad to get into the details. I think this is like an anti pattern because it creates disengaged and like …”
Larson: Engineering executives must educate peers instead of shielding teams
“The most valuable thing as an executive you can do is educate like the other execs on how engineering works, not kind of protecting engineering from visibility from anyone else.”
Larson: Companies harm engineers by coddling them and sheltering them from reality
“Like one of my like hobby horses is that I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them like the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults.
And so like, oh, the engineers won't want to do that work.
We…”
Larson: Many smart but unsuccessful people over-rely on systems thinking
“A lot of the Least successful, but smartest people I've worked with were really strong systems thinking advocates.”
Larson: VC Spending Benchmarks Placate Boards but Do Not Improve Engineering
“You know, this idea that if you just have the right benchmarks, like DCs won't judge you for spending too much in engineering, but it doesn't actually help you get to the right place. It just helps you get your board to be less angry at you.”
Larson: Reporting Sprint Points to Boards Is Completely Fake
“A lot of engineers report on like sprint points or stuff like that to their board, which are just like totally, totally fake thing to be like reporting on.”
Larson: Uber prioritized local team speed over cross-team coordination
“Uber didn't have this as a written value, but implicitly Uber's, Uber's value was do what's good for your team and ignore everyone else because that will slow us down.”
Larson: Holding peers to high standards often gets talented workers labeled combative
“I see a lot of people who are incredibly talented, but they try to hold their peers to a high standard, and then they're viewed as like combative or difficult to work with.”
CTOs and chief architects lack context for centralized technical decisions
“Chief architects and CTOs are pretty inefficient in terms of Actually getting enough context in their heads to make a good decision on any given, given point.”
Larson: Architecture review committees rarely make the best technical decisions
“And then committees, like in almost every architecture group turns into a committee where they have to balance their different perspectives, or they're just like slow and kind of inelegant. It's rarely true that a committee gets the best decision.”
Larson: Salespeople are uniquely talented individuals rather than fungible headcount
“Salespeople are not fungible, replaceable individuals. They're like uniquely talented people.”
Larson: Ideological purity against imperfect engineering metrics slows organizational learning
“You can be ideologically like pure and say we shouldn't measure something, but all it does is slow down the learning of the organization around you. Doesn't actually help you accomplish your goal.”
Larson: Leaders should dive into details when teams violently disagree
“In cases where there is no clear path forward or where the folks who have the context around the path forward are like violently in disagreement, it pays to get into the details and make the decision yourself.”
Will Larson: Large organizations inevitably depend on a few individuals' judgment
“Organizations are really, even, like, very kind of large organizations are the culmination of, like, a few individuals judgment, and there's just no way to escape that, even if you have, like, a huge budget trying to.”
Larson: Ask questions to extract insight from bad executive suggestions
“So like almost always when you get these like really like offhand random ideas from executives, there's a kernel of insight there that you can extract by kind of asking more, more detailed questions to them.”
Engineers cannot achieve true senior-level mastery in four years at one company
“They can't develop everything you need to be an effective senior engineer in four years working in one company. You need to like see different views on these different problems to really kind of develop mastery.”
Hiring managers should override interview panels when they have strong independent conviction
“Helping managers understand their job is to build conviction, not to kind of take the average of everyone else's conviction. And that they should override their team if they have conviction and they don't think that the concerns that are raised are meaningful.”
Larson: Engineering managers shifted from 50%+ hiring time to almost zero interviews
“Like a lot of engineering managers are spending half their time or more hiring like 18 months ago, and now they're doing like two interviews a month or less, maybe zero interviews a month.”
Larson: Common hiring bottleneck is managers lacking confidence to extend offers
“And so for a lot of candidates or a lot of pipelines, the biggest issue is hiring managers don't want to extend any offers because the hiring managers can't get to confidence on any candidate.”
The other half of the tape: Will Larson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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Lenny's Podcast 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Will's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | CTO, Imprint | 1 | 36 | 100% 1/1 | full record on In Depth → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | CTO, Imprint | 1 | 17 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |