Will Larson
25 statements across 1 episodes · 7 bullish · 4 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Nov 16, 2023 by Will Larson · across every show →
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Everything said about Will Larson, oldest first
Nov 16, 2023 bearish
Larson: Unburdening top performers to boost output fails to scale
“So in a lot of these cases, the way to drive up productivity is to reduce the burden around like a small number of like really high performers. But if those performers ever leave, your productivity is going to drop massively as well. And so it's sort of a high…”
Nov 16, 2023 neutral
Larson: CTO struggles usually stem from peer friction or poor shipping velocity
“Typically when a CEO of a 500 person company feels their CTO is, is struggling, they're probably running into like one of two different things. Either the individual CTO is like causing friction with other people on the team. For some reason, like their peers,…”
Nov 16, 2023 positive
Nov 16, 2023
Larson stopped shielding engineering teams and now exposes them to messy reality
“I used to be a big believer in the umbrella concept where it's okay, we should protect our team from the reality and problems around them so that they can focus. But as you work with more senior teams but also even as you just work in generally, I've come to b…”
Nov 16, 2023 positive
Nov 16, 2023
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.”
Nov 16, 2023 negative
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 …”
Nov 16, 2023 positive
Nov 16, 2023
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…”
Nov 16, 2023 neutral
Nov 16, 2023 positive
Nov 16, 2023 negative
Nov 16, 2023
Stripe offered enterprise SLAs with financial penalties below four nines uptime
“So at Stripe, we had a reliability like SLA that we kind of extended to enterprise customers in terms of there was actually like a financial consequence to us if we dipped Below a certain level of uptime. Like I think it was less than four nines of API availab…”
Nov 16, 2023 positive
Nov 16, 2023
Larson canceled Calm's monolith-to-services migration upon joining as CTO
“You know, when I was at Calm, Calm when I joined about 25 engineers, about a hundred when I left,
And when I joined, we were going through a migration from our monolith to a number of services, and I canceled that migration.”
Nov 16, 2023
Nov 16, 2023 neutral
Adapting to company context predicts if an executive lasts over a year
“And this is like one of the, to me, most predictive traits for whether an executive will last more than a year at a company. It's where they come in and they start with, Hey, can I, how can I change myself to fit versus how can I force my entire organization t…”
Nov 16, 2023 positive
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.”
Nov 16, 2023 positive
Nov 16, 2023
Larson: Important disagreements with shared context must be debated live, not asynchronously
“Talking things through live when people do have the shared like context, they just disagree is incredibly valuable and it's almost impossible to kind of like get to the end of these things on like a chat on Slack or something. You really do have to like talk i…”
Nov 16, 2023 neutral
Nov 16, 2023 negative
Nov 16, 2023
Larson: Engineering strategy reduces to resource allocation and decision frameworks
“Engineering strategy comes down to like largely like two kind of core ideas. There's like a resource allocation, like how are you investing the headcount and the, you know, that the budget that you have, and then how do you make how do you make decisions as th…”
Nov 16, 2023
Larson: Stubborn holdouts to new ideas often hold the most valuable context
“As an authority figure coming in, it's easy to kind of look at those folks as holdouts, people who are resistance, resistant to change, people who are, you know, just stubborn, but it's usually those folks who have like the most valuable context.”