Disclosure
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
Larson: Ground-up software rewrites never work out for anyone
“This is a decision that never works out for anyone.”
Opinion
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
Larson: Bad strategies stem from willful disbelief of accurate diagnoses
“Almost all bad strategies basically come down from a willful disbelief of what an accurate diagnosis is, which means then your guiding policies are kind of incoherent to begin with.”
Insight
Larson: The biggest risk to creators is burnout, not slow initial growth
“The biggest risk to content creation of any sort is quitting soon because you get burned out. The biggest risk is not that you grow too slow initially.”
Insight
Larson: Metrics Exist to Educate Executives, Not Be Perfect Datasets
“Metrics are about educating the people consuming the metrics about the reality of the rich data underneath. They're not about this perfect data set that shows everything. Starting with something mediocre, and the Dora metrics are really helpful for diagnosis, …”
Insight
Larson: Useful company values must be honest, applicable, and reversible
“These are the three that I found really useful for any value. Like, is it honest? Is it applicable and can you reverse it? And if not, it's probably actually not helping the team make decisions.”
Assertion Partly supported
Larson: Uber operated under a strict no-cloud policy in 2014
“At Uber, we only used our own data centers. We didn't use the cloud, and this has changed since, since the era I was there, but in the, like, 2014 era, no cloud, and we had a strict no cloud policy”
Assertion Supported
Larson: Stripe strictly enforced a Ruby monolith strategy
“Another good example at Stripe was this idea of We run a Ruby monolith, and that's like, that's what we did.”
Will Larson