YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Larson

lines on the record: 90
first: 2024-01-07
most recent: 2024-01-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I used to do things differently before I had a kid, so I have a three and a half year old, and just your timing, your life, just like really shifts a lot once you have kids. But the biggest thing that I found is finding things to write about that also directly relate to what I'm working on. And this is where I can do something that helps me at work and helps me write at the same time.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally agree. I could keep ranting about this for the entire time. I don't want to derail about this, but I totally agree.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're not competing with other content creators if you think of it as an infinite game, right? You're all working together. You can all help each other grow. There's no like. Maximum number of product writers or thinkers who can be doing something. You're not less successful because Shreyas exists or something like that. There's no competition there. It's like a false dichotomy.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll never make it. There's too many medium writers. But it's just like not true if you just keep writing good stuff. You'll build an audience over time and you can take that audience from platform to platform. What really matters is finding something you can actually keep doing for the next decade. That's way harder than doing it for one year.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just 100% agree with that. I think the other thing is that everyone converges on the same thing that they think people want. So it's like it's crypto two years ago. It's like AI right now or it's like counter AI. Like AI is going to ruin the world. It's just hard to say something very novel because one, like everyone's trying to say something about it. Two, it's almost certainly not what you're that knowledgeable about where if you just stick in your lane I think the biggest risk to writers is quitting a little bit like the 40-year career idea. 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. There's always a sense that like you've missed the wave. Like it's too late to join Substack. There's already the top writers are already there. You'll never be a top writer. It's too late to podcast. There's too many podcasts. You'll never make it. It's too late to join medium.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess about a thousand, like that would roughly be my assumption. I think Are a few years where I wrote, you know. Hundreds of posts. And so if you do that like three years, it's not that hard to get to 1,000 from there”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot and how I've been, you know, I've been writing for 16 some years. And the way I keep doing it is just by writing what's energizing. And what I'm thinking about now, and I don't write what I'm not thinking about, and I don't write for any audience. I just write what is interesting to me. And that means some people don't like it. And that's great. That's totally fine. It's not really for them. It's for people who want to follow the ride. And that's where I focus.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not. To me, the biggest strength of writing what you want is you get to write where there's energy and you don't have to write where there's no energy, which takes you really, really negative. And this also ties into how I write books, which is that I basically write the entire thing before I start working with the publisher. And if you are, I think diligent and good at anticipating what their concerns are going to be, you can mostly reuse the content that you're trying to write. This is also easier in the sorts of books I write. I think harder to do in a really technical introduction to MySQL or something, you can't just resequence those chapters and pretend it's going to work. Those chapters build in a different way than the sort of business book that I write does. But yeah, writing the stuff that's energizing and just giving up on the stuff that's not energizing, that's how I write.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel really strongly that you can write a lot more if you write what you want to write. And so this is one of the reasons I don't write for financial gain. And I don't write very much on schedule. So I've done like a few pieces for magazines, et cetera. But I find that actually really draining to be you have a topic, you have to agree on the topic. If a topic starts missing what you want to write about, you can't fix it a lot of the time. And you're also on this deadline. You're like, oh, I'm like, I'm screwing up. I need to ship this. It needs to be done tomorrow. And I just find that really draining. Conversely, like when I own this schedule, when I get to like write about, hey, like I'm writing on something. So I started writing this infrastructure engineering book a couple years ago. And I just like, it just wasn't there. I just couldn't get it to come together. And so I just stopped. And I'm not writing it anymore. Maybe I'll come back to it at some point.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have two books. The first one, the first one was Stripe Press, the second one self published, and the third one The Riley coming out in like two months effectively.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, the missing canonical book is kind of missing on this one. So I took a stab at strategy and my upcoming book, which is coming out, the engineering executive's primer, coming out early next year. I also took a stab at it and staff engineer my previous book. But I still think there's like a missing book here. So I sort of am like dreaming of writing an engineering strategy book for my next project. Although we'll see if that actually comes together.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People want to get good at strategy, there's a lot of different types of strategy, right? Here are some things I'd really recommend. First, I think the Richard Grumelt book, I think good strategy, bad strategy is probably the right starting point. I think the crux also quite good, but maybe I would read that one second. Great overview of how to think about strategy. I also think thinking in systems, I mentioned that before, related to systems thinking, a big part of strategy is being able to model the reality so we can improve your diagnosis. And so I think that one's really quite good as well. If you get into the engineering side of things, there's a lot of interesting books here. There's technology strategy patterns by Evan Hewitt. There's the value flywheel effect by Anderson, McConne, and O'Reilly, the Phoenix project by Kim Birds, Stafford, which is kind of a modern rewrite of the goal by Goldrat. But I think there's that.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In solving the constraints is to me, I think the most interesting thing that that strategy really does. And I think when we talk about bad strategy, it usually is because the diagnosis is bad. And it's usually because people are sort of exerting what they want to be true on constraints where it's like, hey, we can do all these projects at once. And often that's just not true. But it's hard to convince people of that when they're the CEO or they are really committed to believing it. But almost all bad strategies basically come down from a willful disbelief of what an accurate diagnosis views, which means then you're guiding policies are kind of incoherent to begin with.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We run a Ruby monolith, and that's what we did. And that's evolved a bit since then. There's more Java and the Stripe of 2023 than there was in the Stripe of 2016 or the 2012 or whatnot. But that policy really focused the engineers on building innovative features for our users rather than building kind of different tooling to support different programming languages. And so in both cases, both the Uber policy around like running our own data centers and the Stripe policy around Ruby monoliths, a lot of engineers hated these. But the goal of good strategy is not too appease everyone. The goal of good strategy is to dictate how we invest the limited capacities we have or the limited capabilities we have into the problems we care about. And I think both of them were really effective towards that end.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some like surreal stories from that. We couldn't fit our racks into the data centers. They had to take the roof off the data center and lift the racks in with the crane. There's just like tons of stories. And like all this we had done in three months and truly phenomenal. And Uber wasn't in China for very long. So in some ways, you're like, we did all that just to leave. But they left with like a nice stake on DD Kwaidi, not a bad outcome But I think that strategy we run everything in data centers. We don't use the cloud. Meant we were able to move in and out of different geopolitical constraints and companies that relied on cloud presence simply can't. They're fully constrained by where AWS or Google Cloud or Azure have built out. So that's one good example. Another good example at Stripe was this idea of”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actions are how are we going to implement this cutting policies? And he talks a lot about actions because he's concerned about this idea of like inert strategy where you have like we're going to deprecate our old product features we don't use, but no one deprecates any of them. So he's really concerned about this like non-implementation kind of like useless strategy that doesn't do anything. On engineering, I'm a little bit less worried about that. I think strategy is more interesting on engineering in terms of kind of clarifying how we make future decisions. And so what are a few examples of that? At Uber, we only used our own data centers. We didn't use the cloud. And this has changed since the era I was there. But in the like 2014 era, no cloud and we had a strict no cloud policy. And this was annoying because we had to indent everything ourselves or run copies of everything ourselves. But it also meant that we were able to spin up in China in like literally three months.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing. He'll throw out the crux, I think, came out this year or sometime, which I also read. Both great. And just a phenomenal thinker who has so much depth. I think one of the challenges of writing about strategy is you're like, I've seen two things and I write the book. But I think the thing that's impressive about Richard Jigger Malt is you've seen so many different scenarios that he's able to really operate from both the particular, but also like the general data set in a really interesting way. Another book with similar characteristics is how big things get done by, I forget the authors, but really amazing data set of how mega projects kind of succeed and fail. But anyway, Richard Ramont, definition of strategy is basically three components. There's the diagnosis, like what is the current status quo? Like what are the things that are real today? And there are guiding policies, which are basically based on the diagnoses, like how do you want to address them? And there's actions.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, what is the definition of strategy? And the best one I've ever seen is from Richard Ramalt. He wrote Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And aligns you with what the company actually cares about are really good for you. Even if they're a little bit annoying at a time. And I can expand on this idea a lot, but I won't ramble indefinitely on it”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineering side of things. A common strategy that's really good but very boring is we only use the tools we have today. So a lot of times you'll get engineers that want to introduce new programming languages, new databases, new cloud providers. And a really good strategy for almost all companies is like we just use the standard kit we already have today. And at Carta, when I joined, one of the engineers, Eric Vogel, wrote the standard kit. And that is our strategy of the tools we use. And you know what? Some people are really frustrated by that. And I feel for them. Like it feels like they're losing control. But the power of these boring strategies is that it focuses people's energy on the problems that we value as a company. And so it is painful coming into alignment if you're kind of like slightly misaligned over time. But boring strategies that tell you what actually matters.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the first rule of strategy is that if you write it down, then you can improve it. If it's not written down, it's hard to say if this PM is just not a good PM, or if they're trying to apply the strategy that they misunderstood, or if they actually are correctly applying the strategy from the head of product, that's just not appropriate to the problems they're working on. How do you debug any of that? If you have a written document, even if it's not a super compelling strategy, at least you can start debugging. It's okay that the header product should improve the clarity of this document. Hey, this PM actually isn't applying it correctly. Hey, the strategy actually isn't appropriate for this one business unit where it makes sense for the others. So that's kind of the first thing I think about, but the second kind of big theme on strategy I think about is that often good strategy is so boring. It's hard to talk about. And so, for example, on”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't mean you don't have a strategy. You do have a strategy. It's maybe like a little bit hard to articulate. And maybe it's applied inconsistently across different layers of the product like reporting chain because it's not written down. But it's never true that there's no product strategy. There's always a product strategy. Sometimes it's bad, but there's always one. And true for engineering as well. There's always an engineering strategy. It's just sometimes it's bad.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I start to question whether any function has a strategy at most companies. My general experience is. There's very rarely a Riffin strategy for any company. Sometimes a value statements. You're like, good. Okay. What do I do with that? You're like, build a high quality product. You're like, okay, I don't know what that means. Engineering often has this problem where I think people will make comments like in their kind of their culture amp or their quarterly surveys or whatever. It's like, hey, the strategy is not clear or where's the engineering strategy. And the biggest thing I tell people when they complain, and then engineers complain about the product strategy, like the PMs don't have any strategy or the business has no strategy. And the reality is product, engine, and business always have a strategy. It's just often not written down. And so I really like the first thing I want to do is I push people not to get caught up on the fact that there's no template out there, which is product strategy that someone's like forked and filled in.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feels like we're not hard enough in how we evaluate candidates or something. You go change a bunch of stuff. But often the real problem might be that the hiring manager is making offer extensions to people who never pass Loop anyway. It's just the managers are issuing too many offers because they're panicking. And man, less true now, but a decade or not a decade, like two years ago, like hiring managers panicking to get offers out. That was a real thing that happened a lot. And this just helps you take a complex kind of abstract problem and turn it into something you can actually work in a systematic way.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making decisions, great job of closing candidates. There's just not enough candidates coming in. And so by looking at this, and you can build this model, then you can go to your applicant tracking system, a greenhouse or whatever, and pull the historicals. And you can just see how the historicals.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Posting about their deep thoughts kind of convert into actual people your first, your second, your third. But then as you get deeper into it, you start to actually see interesting things. And so for a lot of candidate 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 the confidence on any candidate. And you'll see in this pipeline, you'll see a ton of candidates getting to offer stage, but almost none of them converting from potential offer to actually offer. And then you can say, hey, hey, here's the problem. You need to go work with the recruiter and the hiring managers on getting conviction about who they should hire. Classic problem with early, early managers, right? Here's a second problem. Manager wants to extend a ton of offers. They do extend them, and none of them actually accept. And so that focuses you on the second problem. But there's a third potential world where actually you're just not getting enough candidates in. You're actually doing a great job.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing to do is to get a model out there of any sort. And so you think about your stocks. And so in a hiring pipeline, you might have potential candidates. And this could be kind of basically infinite. And then you have a couple of inflows. You could have like sourced, you could have outreach. You could have referrals. And then you have the candidates. And those, you know, how many people get sourced is probably a function number of sources you have dedicated to a role. So you have another stock of like how many sources you have. And then that would impact the rate going from potential candidates to actual candidates you've sourced. And then from candidates that you have in that box, you'd have like a conversion rate for people who pass the first recruiter screen. That would move into step two of your process. And then from step two, you have maybe like a hiring manager screen. And that would be another conversion rate. So you can see over time how the candidates of the infinite potential candidates like wandering around LinkedIn.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a lot of this. So, first, always recommend thinking in systems by Donatella Meadows. Really phenomenal book. And a lot of her work is also kind of referencing the work in Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which talks about how small amount of kind of carcinogens or something low in the ecosystem, or the food chain rather, as they get consumed by predators further and further up get concentrated. And that's like a kind of a classic systems thinking problem to think about where you wouldn't think a small amount of carcinogens in like a small fish actually matter. But as they go up the food chain, they start to concentrate it in an unexpected change can happen.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systems thinking is basically you try to think about stocks and flows. So stocks are things that accumulate, and flows are kind of the movement from a stock to another thing. And so what's a simple example of a stock? A stock could be the number of fish in a lake. A stock could be the number of people fishing in a lake. And so a flow between those two could be the number of fish in a lake will decrease at some rate based on the number of people fishing in that lake. So if there's a ton of fishers, the stock of fish will go down faster. There's only a couple fish, it will go down slower. But also, then there's these flows, which kind of dictate that, where if you got much more efficient fishermen, the flow of fish out might go down. But also fish do reproduce. So then there's another flow going back. So based on the current number of fish and the reproduction rate, the current number of fishers and their fishing rate, you start to see how these kind of evolve over time.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can stop doing that and go, like, actually do the work so that the biggest thing I tell people is this is a great way to learn, but you also have to do things. You can't just learn. That's not our entire job.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Measure twice, cut once. Like, sure, but you don't measure infinite times and never get to cutting. You do have to cut at some point to actually make impact. But we just got caught a little bit there. And I think a lot of people who get too far into systems thinking make the same mistake where they think reality is wrong and reality is never wrong. Reality is always right. Your model is always wrong if it's in conflict with reality. That conflict, that gap is really interesting. And that's where you can learn. And so I have this model. It's really clean. It represents your hiring pipeline that moving through different steps. It represents your incidents and how you remediate incidents. It can model almost anything pretty quickly when you get good at it. And then understanding how reality is in conflict with that, you start to understand where your mental model is wrong. And then you can go educate yourself and improve the model and just keep doing that. And at some point, like the model is close enough.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There'll be realities wrong. And so, what's a concrete example? At Stripe, we worked on incident management. And so Stripe, pretty important company where our API is available, if the API is down, you lose money. And if you lose a lot of money, you leave Stripe because you're pretty upset about that. The number one thing businesses need to do is to collect money successfully for the service that they're selling, right? Stripe super important. And so we did a lot of analysis on incidents trying to understand why things weren't working, you know, what we could do better. We got like so caught up in the analysis that we sort of lost track of whether we're actually improving things. It took us a while to figure that out because we were so stuck in the systems thinking model. And it's not like, oh, the team was wrong. It's like I was wrong. I was caught up in that model myself to realize like, hey, we weren't actually prioritizing improvements. We were just prioritizing measurement. And you can't keep measuring.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the least successful but smartest people I've worked with were really strong systems thinking advocates. And so I do want to say like every kind of framework has like a lot of downsides. There's no framework that people can apply consistently universally and get good results. And so briefly on this one, what I see is like often people will find the spot where their system and reality are in conflict.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the challenges is if we aren't comfortable holding engineers accountable because we just want to retain all the engineers, then we can't put them in senior roles. And so I think we're actually seeing a bit of a shift where we can actually hold them accountable, which means we can put them in senior roles, which means the engineers can actually get what they've been trying to get the entire time, but we haven't been able to because we've been coddling them a little bit too much.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a little bit of both, but I think there's been in this previous era where hiring and retention were kind of like one of the biggest ways you evaluate it kind of middle management, losing team members was huge, huge issue, right? And so you started to coddle a little bit, which is actually bad. Again, baptism engineers, bad for the teams, bad for kind of everyone, bad for efficiency of the organization. But now something that I love is we get to like give in.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's true. I think this actually has been bad for engineers in some way. One of my hobby horses is that I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults. And so like, oh, the engineers won't want to do that work. That's actually not good for the engineers to kind of be sheltered from what is important. And so I actually, one of the, I think, highlights is that I think we're coming back this moment where we can actually treat engineers like our peers and put them into really senior leadership roles and not have this kind of baseline assumption of like, oh, we have to coddle them or hide them from the real problems. And this is how they're going to get the opportunity to grow as well. That's like a highlight for me and kind of the shift recently.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like two interviews a month or less, maybe zero interviews a month. So there's a real shift in just the amount of time people are putting into hiring. Instead, like all these different competencies that have kind of become more critical were a really great engineering director might have just been spending their time hiring, hiring really well. And that could be a top reformer. Now that person can't actually demonstrate what they're great at. And so that person might be perceived as a low performer if they're not also figuring out how to lead the team. getting deeper into details and also like, you know, sometimes getting into the figuring out what is the right allocation? Like what is the right sizing of engineering teams, right? Like this is stuff that we weren't talking about much or maybe if you really pissed off the CEO, maybe an infrastructure, you just grew a little bit slower next year. But different ballgame at this point where teams are actually disappearing. Teams are getting cut down. Teams are getting consolidated. And that's just something that we kind of avoid.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a pretty strange time in the market. So I think I started working and right before the 2008 kind of crash. And so the first two years there were not so good. When I joined Yahoo, there was a layoff basically every like four months. There was a layoff of some sort. It's pretty chaotic. But then we got into the last decade and it was just smooth, right? And so, you know, numbers went up, revenue went up, headcount went up. And people started learning how to build really large teams. People started learning how to hire a lot. When I was at Uber, some days I would do like six interviews back to back. I would just be in a conference room. And at some point, you can't even remember who you're talking to because you talk to so many people one after another after another. You just have to like scramble scrambled notes. You're trying to like decode afterwards. Pretty different now. Like a lot of engineering managers were spending half their time or more hiring like 18 months ago and now they're doing.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. I hope to be a good early engineering guest before you pivot entirely to engineering at some point in the future.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults. And so like, oh, the engineers won't want to do that work. Not good for the engineers to kind of be sheltered from what is important. And so I actually, one of the highlights is that I think we're coming back this moment where we can actually treat engineers like our peers and put them into really senior leadership roles and not have this kind of baseline assumption of like, oh, we have to coddle them or hide them from the real problems. And this is how they're going to get the opportunity to grow as well.”
2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source