Will Larson > Quotes

“The fact that something stops working at significantly increased scale is a sign that it was designed appropriately to the previous constraints rather than being over-designed.23”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The criteria I use to evaluate if a team’s sprint works well: Team knows what they should be working on. Team knows why their work is valuable. Team can determine if their work is complete. Team knows how to figure out what to work on next. Stakeholders can learn what the team is working on. Stakeholders can learn what the team plans to work on next.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The next time you’re about to dive into fixing a complicated one-off situation, consider taking a step back and documenting the problem but not trying to solve it. Commit to refreshing the policy in a month, and batch all exceptions requests until then. Merge the escalations and your current policy into a new revision. This will save your time, build teams’ trust in the system, and move you from working the exceptions to working the policy.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The first phase of a planning cycle is exploring the different problems that you could pick to solve. It’s surprisingly common to skip this phase, but that, unsurprisingly, leads to inertia-driven local optimization. Taking the time to evaluate which problem to solve is one of the best predictors I’ve found of a team’s long-term performance.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I can’t stress enough that these fixes are slow. This is because systems accumulate months or years of static, and you have to drain that all away. Conversely, the same properties that make these fixes slow to fix make them extremely durable once in effect!”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Trust metrics over intuition. You should have a way to measure every project. Quality is a complex system, the sort of place where your intuition can easily deceive you. Similarly, as you become more senior at your company, your experience will no longer reflect most other folks’ experiences. You already know about the rough edges, and you’ll be the first person in line to get help if you find a new one, but most other folks don’t. Metrics keep you honest.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Organizations spending significant time on exceptions are experiencing exception debt. The escape is to stop working the exceptions, and instead work the policy.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“When you’re behind, it can be tempting to spend all of your time firefighting and neglect hiring, but if your business is growing quickly, then eventually you hire or burn out.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized. I cannot emphasize this point too much.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Keep innovation and maintenance together. A frequent practice is to spin up a new team to innovate while existing teams are bogged down in maintenance. I’ve historically done this myself, but I’ve moved toward innovating within existing teams.5 This requires very deliberate decision-making and some bravery, but in exchange you’ll get higher morale and a culture of learning, and will avoid creating a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“As our industry matures and tackles ever-bigger problems, more and more companies are recognising the need for engineers who have “seen some things”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“The next time you’re about to dive into fixing a complicated one-off situation, consider taking a step back and documenting the problem but not trying to solve it.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I believe that, at quickly growing companies, there are two managerial skills that have a disproportionate impact on your organization’s success: making technical migrations cheap, and running clean reorganizations.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“good piece of written communication is the most effective means of broadcasting ideas and scaling yourself.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“managers just don’t always know how to support their most senior engineers. How can you be sure your reports are working on the right things, when they’re expected to advise you on the most important problems rather than the other way around?”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“When I started managing, my leadership philosophy was simple: The Golden Rule6 makes a lot of sense. Give everyone an explicit area of ownership that they are responsible for. Reward and status should derive from finishing high-quality work. Lead from the front, and never ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“you only get value from projects when they finish: to make progress, above all else, you must ensure that some of your projects finish.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I believe that management, at its core, is an ethical profession.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“As managers looking to grow ourselves, we should really be pursuing scope: not enumerating people but taking responsibility for the success of increasingly important and complex facets of the organization and company. This is where advancing your career can veer away from a zero-sum competition to have the largest team and evolve into a virtuous cycle of empowering the organization and taking on more responsibility. There is a lot less competition for hard work.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Freedom from the cycle of re-establishing one’s competence came up frequently as a key advantage of the Staff title. These informal gauges weren’t mentioned by every Staff”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“There are two best kinds of reorganizations: The one that solves a structural problem. The one that you don’t do. There is only one worst kind of reorg: the one you do because you’re avoiding a people management issue.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“When I spoke with Keavy McMinn, one interesting point she made was that sometimes it’s helpful to be able to see things without the full historical context. Did you ever find that your context made it harder to move forward? Absolutely. I would notice myself coming into conversations with a team and I was prepared to give them a seven year history of every time someone had attempted the thing that they’re doing and why it didn’t work. It would take deliberate effort to review that history and ask myself, “Why is this information helpful or relevant to them?”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Adding new individuals to a team disrupts that team’s gelling process, so I’ve found it much easier to have rapid growth periods for any given team, followed by consolidation/gelling periods during which the team gels. The organization will never stop growing, but each team will.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Authority lets you get away with weak arguments and poor justifications, but it’s a pretty expensive way to work with people, because they’ll eventually turn off their minds and simply follow orders—if they’re in a complicated compensation or life situation, that is. Otherwise, they’ll just leave.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“a related antipattern is the gatekeeper pattern. Having humans who perform gatekeeping activities creates very odd social dynamics, and is rarely a great use of a human’s time. When at all possible, build systems with sufficient isolation that you can allow most actions to go forward. And when they do occasionally fail, make sure that they fail with a limited blast radius.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I believe that almost every internal problem can be traced back to a missing or poor relationship, and that with great relationships it is possible to come together and solve almost anything.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The fixed cost of creating and maintaining a policy is high enough that I generally don’t recommend writing policies that do little to constrain behavior. In fact, that’s a useful definition of bad policy. In such cases, I instead recommend writing norms, which provide nonbinding recommendations. Because they’re nonbinding, they don’t require escalations to address ambiguities or edge cases.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“consistency is a precondition of fairness.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Prioritize long-term success over short-term quality. As your scope increases, the important work that you’re responsible for may simply not be possible to finish. Worse, the work that you believe is most important, perhaps high-quality one-on-ones, is often competing with work that’s essential to long-term success, like hiring for a critical role. Ultimately, you have to prioritize long-term success, even if it’s personally unrewarding to do so in the short term. It’s not that I like this approach, it’s that nothing else works.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management