A lot of times of like, oh no one's working on this, I can make a huge improvement here, but then they'll get like signals from leadership that actually this isn't valued. And so I think it's really important to understand like what should be valuable and then understand like what is actually valued and then make your own decisions based on that in terms of where you want to put your time.
Hello and welcome to The Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, The Engineering Leadership Community. I'm Gerry Lee, founder of ELC, and I'm Patrick Gallagher, and we're your host. Our show shares the most critical perspectives habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.
Time is our most valuable asset. It's the only thing you can't have more of. So how do you make sure the time you spend at work as an engineering leader actually matters? In this episode we have a conversation with Will Larson, CTO at Calm. Will helps us confront the existential conversation of time by spotlighting several of the traps people fall into when evaluating their time.
He covers a number of different ways to better focus on long term high impact work instead of seeking short term comfort. And he shares tons of great stories and examples to help you better focus on what really matters. Let me introduce you to Will. Higher to his time at Calm, he previously worked at Stripe Uber and Dig. He's the author of two engineering leadership books, an elegant puzzle, systems of engineering management, and staff engineering leadership beyond the management track.
Will's been writing on his blog, a rational exuberance since 2007 and has over 600 different posts covering tons of great content on engineering leadership management and career. Enjoy our conversation with Will Larson.
Well, Jerry and I, when we were talking about preparing for this episode, one of the things that really stood out to us was there's really only like a small number of engineering leaders who've committed an extensive amount of thoughtful work about this world of engineering leadership.
And you're somebody who's been doing this since 2007. The first thing we wanted to say is just how much we appreciate and really admire the work that you do in the contribution that you've made to engineering leaders because you have spent so much time thinking about this and synthesizing. And it's something that has just been a joy to research and read. So first off, we just want to say thank you for everything that you do. It's fantastic.
Thank you. I think there's a little bit of altruism, but I think for me writing is a way to learn as well, where you'll often have something I'm really struggling with at work and trying to figure out what I should actually do. Often when I'm trying to give advice, I'm like a very intuitive person. So immediately know what I would do is this, but when I'm trying to explain why I would do that, I can't.
And then I have to really write it down to actually give useful advice instead of just telling someone what I would do, which is like almost never very helpful.
That's awesome. So we're here to talk about how to work on what matters. And I think over the past few years, Jerry and I in different ways have experienced challenging moments in our careers in life that had made us confront as you've described in some of the articles that you've written as the mortal countdown that we have an unknown yet finite amount of time left.
I think for me, really, there was a two to three week period where my company was going through massive layoffs. There was some death in my family. It was going through experiences with my family with divorce and family displacement. All of this like happened at once and it really shook me. And these are things that I viewed as sort of just as a stability. And it made me ask the question of like, am I actually using my time in a way that actually matters.
And in a beautiful way that also sort of catalyzed my decision to get involved with ELC and which is why we're here now having this conversation. And so thinking about that question of, you know, the finality of time. And are we doing what actually matters. I was wondering if there was a moment in your life or career that stands out to you where you had to confront that question of, is this the best use of my time. Am I actually working on what matters.
Can think of a couple of different examples. And into me, I think sometimes these are slightly different questions. There's this like finality of time where you realize what you're doing just isn't working. And then I think sometimes there's like other moments when you're like reaching for some sort of comforting task, which it's just like almost a ritual where you're like, I'm going to go do this thing that makes me comfortable.
Even though you know, it's like really not the right thing to be working on. So I can think of a couple of different examples one for each. And so in the former, I think six or seven years ago, I was working at Uber. I was on a trip to Lithuania where we had an engineering office that mostly everyone in that group was reporting into my organization at that point.
And we're doing this migration. We were moving out of our primary, our home data center, finally moving to it, a new data center for the first time. So I'm in a hotel room in Lithuania working at night migrating services over to our new data center to hit this timeline of Halloween coming up.
And then I got this call from my partner at the time that they were moving out. And so you're in Lithuania and you get a call from your partner of seven years that they're moving out while you're on a business trip, trying to migrate this stupid data center over to another data center.
And I think it's moments like that, your entire what am I doing here, like flips a little bit. And to me, that was a really grounding moment where I just really thought about what I was doing and what I was giving to work and like what I was giving to rest of my life. And had to do a little bit of a reset to think about where my time was going, where I wanted it to go. And so that's like one kind of the finality of time was very like present in that moment, right.
A different example, though, where I caught myself snacking, which is one of the categories, they think about where you do something comfort and because you know a lot of times like when I eat it's not because I'm hungry. I'm just like looking for some sort of. Happy moment, particularly in like the year of the pandemic, you're like just like I'm going to I'm going to eat a snack. I don't eat it, but my kitchen's here. It's I'm working for home and I'm just going to eat something.
And I can think of like when I started like an engineering book club when I was at Stripe. Or I was just like a little bit underwater and I like coupled with things I was working on or longer and like really important projects, but projects that take six or 12 months to see a lot of momentum on. I was like, you know what, I'm just going to start a book club and we're going to meet and it's going to feel like I've accomplished something. And in that moment, I knew I just shouldn't do it.
But I just like wanted to feel like I had done like finished something and I did it anyway. And then you know, two weeks later, as like really regretting, I was like, I should not have wasted my time on this. This is the wrong thing to be doing. And I knew it. But I just couldn't stop myself from trying to get that taste of completion from some sort of familiar task. And what's so interesting is like it seems productive, but not like it sounds like bring together people.
I'm talking about engineering leadership personally between Jerry and I like that sounds like our dream and would be the most productive use of time anyway. And so that seems like almost contradictory. There's like the book flow and it talks about like we have a finite amount of attention in our lives and have to figure out where to put it on a smaller scale. Like when you're doing work, your job or what not like you only have so much energy.
Even when there's things that are like non-money quite valuable and I agree like leadership training sharing your thoughts and learning from a book together like personal development. These are all like really valuable things. But if there's something really important that you're struggling on, if you take that energy away and put it into something else, even though that thing is still valuable, you're still jeopardizing the thing that really matters.
That's where I think you have to draw the distinction, although in a different case to your point, that could be the most valuable thing you can be doing. But knowing your own energy levels and where you need to be focused, I think you can identify where you're cheating a little bit in that way. You bring up the concept of flow and it sounds like you have a pretty thoughtful approach into assessing how you spend your time at where it fits in relation to one another.
And so I was wondering if you could help us understand where most people go wrong or get tripped up when they're evaluating how they spend their time as a senior leader or as an engineering leader. Where do most people go wrong with this? Yeah, I think this is funny. I think this is a question that everyone knows the correct answer to, but actually doing it is super hard. So the correct answer is like one, like you should actually be intentional about looking at where your time goes.
So like look at your calendar, like actually do some of the calendar reviews and understand where you're spending your time. And then to like don't focus on like urgent short-term things to the exclusion of more important, longer things that aren't on fire. Everyone knows that right by the time that you're like five years into a career, like you know the answer, but for some reason it's actually extremely hard to live that advice even when you know it's true.
For that specific problem, because I find this like happens to me all the time, there are some urgent messages that pop up or the never ending chasm of email. And there just is that dopamine drip of if I just fire up this one email, I'm gonna feel really good. Do you have any insight in what's helped you focus on those most important things and divert attention away from some of the short-term snacks?
I think there's two things that I think are important here. The first is that I think there's this idea that like busyness is a choice. And I think that's true, but it's also like usually the person telling you that is an executive who has a lot of agency over how their time is spent. A lot of folks don't have that same level of agency, so you can feel like pretty infuriating when someone's like your busyness is actually a choice.
And it is a choice, but it's often not your choice. It's a choice someone else has made for you. And so the difference is when an executive says like oh, business is a choice, what they mean is I made that choice for myself. And when they tell you that busyness is a choice, what they mean is they made that decision for you.
And so I think it can be like a little bit disorienting when people say that. But if people are really busy in an organization, it's because someone or some group of forces in the organization have like decided that busyness is an important thing. And so people aren't busy by accident. Every system like is perfectly designed to perpetuate its current behavior.
When you notice you're really busy, there's some choice that's happening that is causing that it's not yours, but it's somewhere in the organization. And you can choose to actually make the investments to not have that be true. An example that a lot of like middle managers and large companies get is kind of administrative support.
And so a lot of companies make it effectively impossible to get administrative support because they want to avoid the proliferation of admins, which is a reasonable goal. But then it means that you have middle managers for like normally some of your talented folks who become bureaucrats. And there is a choice that has made them bureaucrats instead of empowered leaders. It's just not their choice.
And so I think that's one idea that I think is important is go talk to the person who's making the choice that is making you busy. And I think learning from that because there is a choice deliberately happening that has put you in that spot. And two, I think the other thing that happens, which is similar but more subtle, which is I think responding to the social cues, or like if you have a production incident, there's like something is on fire.
Very few companies can reward the person who doesn't go help. And a lot of times like you only need three people in their helping. And so there's like a social pressure to go be visible. And I call this preening where you do something that's like highly visible, but that actually low value. And I think incidents are probably the most frequent example of this and engineering organization.
For engineers who jump in and throw ideas into an incident, which there's already the right people participating in it. And it's because they really want to be seen. And they do it because it's rewarded right like they get called out so glad that you jumped in love that this person jumps in. And usually the people doing the recognition aren't in the spot to evaluate who is particularly helpful in a given incident or not.
And honestly, it's quite hard to tell who's helpful in a given incident in that moment. So I really think that these are circumstances that we create with the culture, but then also some of the organizational decisions we make like busyness is not mandatory. So like if you're someone who's in a company that is prioritizing and recognizing people for their high visibility work, but not the people doing the high impact work, how does somebody navigate that experience in a way to be successful.
First, this is pretty challenging right I mentioned incidents, another good example is things like architecture review groups where people really want to be part of this architecture team. But once they're present, they actually don't engage with it. And like their goal was to be listed in this group. And it's kind of a status orientation and not to actually give useful architecture advice.
It happens a lot. And one of the things I think that we do kind of organizationally that incentivizes this sort of status seeking is the lack of titles or the lack of clarity around titles. And so one of my goals with this project I've been working on talking to folks who are in staff and principal engineer rules.
And it's kind of exploring like the impact and value of titles. And one of the things that happens when we don't have titles when every engineer is just labeled the software engineer or something is that people start assigning value and kind of status on to like random things.
So this is negative in tons of ways, but one of it is that you'll think about being in this team meeting or being in that group meeting or whatever is the actual source of status. So first, there's a lot we can do as leaders. And I think that's not just managers, but it's anyone in a leadership role, including engineers who can push to change some of these decisions that incentivize status seeking in ways that aren't helpful.
And I think if you're in a company that really does value this sort of high visibility work is extremely hard to change that from the inside because the company is reward people who understand the game, the given company is playing. And so the people who are in high status roles are people who are good in that company, finding with the company values, which in this case is like work that's actually not particularly valuable and optimizing for it.
And I think it's extremely hard to change this sort of cultural like evaluation of impact. And I think you could get like new senior leadership that that can change. But I do think there's a bit of a up or out aspect at companies like this for people either choose to kind of learn the lesson the company is telling them around like do more premium or that like a fence kind of their ethos and they leave.
So I do think it's quite hard unless you're in like a very senior role to actually change something like this because it really represents someone seniors values within the company. And you can't just change those or ignore those. There's something real that are coming to make the organization work that way. The two examples you mentioned about printing our picture review incident. I can totally resident. I've seen that a lot in my previous companies.
There are ways that can help mitigate that because then your leader you want your best talent to focus on problem that a lot of people can solve. It's a great question. I think there's no one size fits all solution for anything. But in this case, I find if you find the scenarios that happen a lot.
So let's think about incidents, for example, very common situation for a small company is that you have a slack room. There's an incident someone's like, hey, the sites down, they do an act here, everyone jumps in, everyone's trying to improve it. And then the people who don't come help that go where was will during this incident, like I thought will would have been really helpful. They didn't show up. And so there's this like social pressure to show up right.
And then a better version of this is now you have like on call. And then you have a rotation and you know who's responsible to be there. But people still feel like the social pressure to jump in. And so how can you help people not feel that they have to jump in. And that's right thing setting like standard ways of working where it's a K be on call will always be the first person to jump in.
And then it's their responsibility to ask for help if they need it. We don't need to go jump in. And by setting kind of norms and standards and structure, I think we can like decentivize this similar for the architecture of you, example, if you are really explicit about how you have to engage in the architecture of you.
And then the easiest way to like decentivize any behaviors to make sure like following that behavior requires doing a lot of work. So the number one way to push back on people who want status is to ensure that status requires a lot of work.
And so if you want to join the architecture team, that's great. But like you have to review this many architecture proposals. And you have to do it in this timeline. And it's this much work. And we're going to review them together afterwards to make sure that they're really helpful. And if you're not sure if I see some helpful work and I can rewrite it until it is helpful before we send it forward.
It gets you to answer your question like really concisely just make sure there's a lot of work involved in any sort of status. And as long as you do that, things tend to work out because even if you can't prevent people from chasing status as long as you make it expensive. Like they kind of balance out a little bit. How do you see printing typically reflected in engineering leaders because the two examples earlier I could review instant is more for engineers I see.
The most common example is the dive on where you just jump in, you know, like there's some problem and you're in the room trying to solve it yourself. And instead of kind of understanding like the structure and the right leaders to solve it. As leaders sometimes you don't get a lot of feedback and it can become easy to be convinced that we have really exceptionally good ideas.
Sometimes people do which is important, but the lack of negative feedback is not equivalent to actually like being highly capable. And when we go into rooms like I think a lot of rooms shut down when we as senior leaders enter them. And then if they seem like a dysfunctional team where they seem like they have no ideas, but we've actually by our presence change is kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
You can't really tell if the team works if if you're in it as a leader because if you change it by the nature of existing. I really think dive bombing is like number one. I think not creating clarity around where decisions need to be made and not delegating them down is another good example. For example, every person we hire has to be interviewed by only me before they can get approved. Like I'm the only person who has like the correct talent radar to make approvals.
That's a good example of kind of like forcing yourself into the process where often you'll see people build like really sophisticated systems of managing up to get your approval. Where you're no longer really approving the candidate per se now like the team that you've asked to do this has built an entire system of how to convince you to get to yes. And they're doing even more work to convince you than they are in terms of evaluating the candidate.
Basically every company I think that scales to some point ends up with a system along those lines. I've seen some companies were like every piece of copy. Like every piece of writing has to be approved by you know a very senior individual and they become like the bottleneck. I think it's senior leaders basically what it boils down to is the lack of trust and delegation is sort of the form of preening for senior leaders.
I feel like I've had so many moments of my life flash before my eyes as you were describing some of those things. You've mentioned a couple examples and stories of snacking we talked a little bit about preening. I know that another thing that you've talked about is chasing ghosts and I think this one was surprising to me because when I learned something I want to be able to apply those lessons to the next instance of a problem.
So with this you talk about how that can lead to some hidden problems when it comes to actually working on things that matter. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about what is chasing ghosts. Where have you seen that and how does that go wrong for people. So every solution is appropriate to the specific context right and so when you join a new company what's the classic advice that people give you it's like wait 90 days before you do anything.
And this is like not very good advice. I think it's extremely rare as a leader to get hired into a situation where you can just like spend 90 days kind of like understanding the lay of the land. Some things are just like really on fire and just require immediate action and some things aren't and so there's a lot of judgment in terms of which things can wait 90 days and it is I think at the end ages to wait and build context when you can.
But some issues are just like too serious to wait and so something that I see that happens a lot for senior leaders in particular and this happens for engineers and this happens for like managers as well, two different varieties but the engineer version of this is you join a company and you're like this this just doesn't work or build system sucks that uses Jenkins that uses like EC2 instances directly and you're like we really got to roll out Kubernetes. It's just like urgent that we do this.
And you know like there's a lot of value to Kubernetes. There's a lot of things that are great about it is a super useful tool. What you would build might be much better than what exists, but there's a reason why it is kind of the way it is and I think if you don't understand why it is the way it is and just presuppose a solution.
It's really hard to have confidence your solution is better instead what you've done is you've projected something you're comfortable and familiar with on to the situation. It's like when you're losing a game of chess or something and you just knock the pieces over and now no one knows where the pieces are so everyone's equal but you're equal in the sense that everything that was there is gone and so that's like the individual contributor engineer version of it.
The manager version of it is like one often the same where a lot of managers come in and want to kind of reset the company architecture. This happens a lot for like product architecture or decay. This is just not appropriate to the scale or the maturity. I think the way we did it before my last company was just better than this and we just need to shuffle everything and I think this is like an attempt to get back to something that people understand.
The easiest way to be the most knowledgeable person in the room is to ensure no one knows anything and you know just the slightest bit about it. There's a lot of times when I think about this idea of chasing ghosts. It's people trying to recreate something they're familiar with that no one else understands which will make them the central core authority on a topic.
It's a little bit like a similar idea where the best way to be viewed as a great interviewer is to say no to everyone because then like you're the best because you have the highest standard. If you come in and make sure no one else knows anything about how things work. You're the smartest person but ultimately I think the damage the company is extremely large.
And so to me the idea here is just making sure that you understand the context and hold yourself genuinely accountable to solving the current needs. Not just erase everything and put something you're comfortable on top of it. That reminds me of learning there is an anthropology component to a role when you step into a new organization often it's invisible that what happened in the past the lack of anything of that can lead to really big problems.
I think we talked about this one time when we have a peak within a few years ago that for a near executive that when a transition from one company to another company. And then the signing profile they were hired to solve a problem that have solved in the past. But that often fails. How the problem is the teaching goes phenomenal that you describe that people projecting based on their past experience to seemingly alike situation.
So I'm curious two things one you just transition from strive to come this there a vernis of that potential issue what happy to catch the things that would otherwise cause problem and secondly how do you see the same age reflecting other people. One of the challenges is like typically when you hire a senior leader externally onto an established company you are being hired to solve like some sort of real or perceived problem.
But you really never getting the job because there's the belief that everything is going perfectly well. I think it does happen sometimes but it's pretty infrequent. So the challenges often like the perceived problem that you're hired for is not like quite the right problem. And that's why you're being hired particularly as an executive you're being hired because you have all this context.
The people who are shaping the narrative for you before you come in don't have the same level of expertise in your field likely which is why they're hiring you to be like a senior leader representing it. And so I think there is if you hold on to this like image of what you've been told about what the problem is or what the solution is I think it's it's really easy to get trapped in that.
And I think you have to hold this idea of like here's what I've been told and that people telling me that have a ton of confidence and the really smart people when they really care about this company and they have a great perspective. But then it's also like what am I actually seeing and like what's the delta there.
Because I think people have blind spots but also like you just have a really attuned perception to certain types of organizational issues from your own experience that other people might not know this. I think it's really important to come into balance these two different ideas of like what do I actually know versus like what have I been told and like what can I personally hold up.
You know in a lot of cases there's going to be like these complex relationships that between individuals at the company that like an understanding those and coming to have like a firm perspective on what's happened is a big part of the initial job. But an equally important part of the job is just like resetting some of like the previous engagements where you're like you know I don't really know exactly how we got to the spot.
But we're like wiping this clean and we're going to start over and this is how we're going to work together. And I do think part of the balance is a new leader is like figuring out how much do you seek to understand versus how much do you like seek to erase. And I think there is something valuable here in terms of erasing particularly a lot of the complicated relationships, et cetera.
So like hey like we just have to start over this hasn't worked. We understand it hasn't worked and we're starting over together with these kind of rules and behaviors and engagements. To what you mentioned about kind of thing that like shining on leader that comes in. So this is like a really unique tool where like often there'll be someone who has been saying exactly what you come in and say, but when you say it as this like new person hired you get heard.
And I think people get really annoyed about this and it's an annoying experience right where like hey we need to prioritize reliability or something and then like you know you hire Jerry. And reliability is really important to the college areas extremely smart, supremely frustrating. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's just so annoying. I've been saying this for years.
But the thing is like a lot of people are saying a lot of things for a long time and figuring out which of these is like really important and what to exactly do about it is actually extremely challenging right. And not just that Jerry or whoever like the new leader is saying it's important. It's that you like trust their judgment like we've through all these different problems and articulate that. That's not only one of the most important but also like the solution as like an appropriate one.
And so I really think it's important when people have concerns like that that they seek to understand why they're not happening. And because the people don't trust you and understanding that then gives you the ability to figure out how to go back and try again. Or you're saying it in a way that doesn't resonate with them like maybe you're talking about the end hearing toil and how hard that is for your team and they're like objectively I don't want your team to be overworked.
But what I really care about is like this for other things over here. You have to figure out a way to express like value that actually resonates with whoever you're talking to. And I think that the transition topics a little bit will we've covered a lot of things to help people spotlight where they might be trapped where things might go wrong as they're trying to evaluate if they're spending their time appropriately.
But I know you've also spent a lot of time really thinking thoughtfully about how to help people figure out what to focus on on the things that really matter. And so I was wondering if you share just your thoughts about how do you intentionally focus on what really matters. And so I think it's a little bit of a hierarchy of what to focus on. And so it can walk you through with some of the pieces and it's not like a perfect hierarchy.
You don't necessarily do all of one bucket before we move on to the next. But I think it's a useful framework to just think about a given task as if all the any of these buckets. And if not, it's probably not the right thing to be working on. But the first one's just like existential issues. And some companies have existential issues and some don't at a given point, but when I was at dig, we were like, hey, we have five months of salary left.
And if we don't get the revenues up from ads in that case, like we're doomed. And so that was like really clear. It's like revenues go up more users or like no money. And so that was like super helpful just very clear. And then other companies have worked at which I won't, I guess you go too much detail, like almost every company, even large companies that are very established run into things that are extremely problematic for the business that they're not addressed.
I think things like GDPR or good example of a few years ago, a lot of companies had to get this done. Or they had a lot of challenges in terms of operating in Europe, which for a lot of large companies is just not, you can't just like pull out of Europe. Even harder than getting GDPR working, getting a GDPR compliant solution is like pulling out Europe somehow quickly, like that's incredibly difficult for an established company to do.
And so I think things like that where you just have to get it done, you can't not get it done without harming the business immensely. So existential issues that are the starting bucket. But then I think what's the idea of like places where there's a room and attention, this goes back a little bit to the preening bit where oftentimes there's like opera community and like why is no one working on this.
And so a good example of this could be durable reliability improvements, not just jumping into an incident to try to remediate it, but actually like understanding the root causes, figuring out the stability improvement or something to actually prevent future incidents. And you'd be like, why is everyone only working on reactive stuff and no one's working on proactive stuff.
Like here's a huge opportunity for me to show a lot of value. And sometimes that works out, but a lot of times people at some companies are like, hey, like why are you wasting time on this theoretical work to improve something like we should just be shipping features and we'll do with incidents that they happen.
The reason there's a lot of room to make impact is that there's actually like a lesson, which is that there's no desire, there's no attention on the sort of work that you're trying to do. I think unfortunately, a lesson, a lot of folks have learned is like similarly like diversity and inclusion work is a lot of times of like, oh, no one's working on this, I can get a huge improvement here.
But then they'll get like signals from leadership that actually this isn't valued. And so I think it's really important to understand like what should be valuable and then understand like what is actually valued and then make your own decisions based on that in terms of where you want to put your time. At a couple follow up questions before you continue through your progression, I'm going to go back to existential issues.
Can you share a little bit more about your framework about the iterative elimination tournament as a way to identify and roadmap some of those future existential issues to help people anticipate.
Yeah, this is a framework that I learned from one of my coworkers, I don't know, maybe six or seven years ago, but it was really interesting idea where basically the challenge we had at that moment is that we were a Facebook advertising company and we need to pull down a huge amount of data from Facebook APIs.
And there are two different teams who wanted to build like their own solutions to the same problem. And one team was building this like extremely elegant, beautiful, well designed, hyper scalable solution, but none of it worked at all. And it was like way behind schedule. This other team was building this like very clumsy, like unlovable solution, but it like it actually did some stuff you could actually use it to like pull data.
And so there's this kind of discussion of like how do we think about these two different approaches and like which one do we green light, do we green light both of them. And this sort of back this idea of this inner elimination tournament where it's it's important to do something that's good enough to like actually meet what you need today because otherwise your project gets canceled or in like a basketball tournament or something like you get eliminated and you don't go on to the next rounds.
But also like it turns out getting to the next round isn't that valuable, you can't also win that round. And so I think balancing this idea of like doing something that's good enough to like meet what you need today. So the business stands up, but also doing stuff that's good enough so that you're able to survive the next round as well.
Maybe like a concrete example or another example around this is like your database is falling over and like probably what you want to do is something like really clever, like moving to something that's like scales horizontally and definitely get a cockroach to be a spanner or a
TV or something, but probably what you should do is you just take your heaviest table that's getting the most reason right to just move it to like a new chart. And it's like pretty ugly. It's like kind of annoying. It's a lot less elegant, but it's going to work almost certainly much faster than migrating everything to a new whole new back end.
And that then frees you up enough time to do something more sophisticated, but if you try to go directly to the more sophisticated solution, your companies like you're going to have all these incidents that are depending on your company like very damaging to you. And so just being able to think about in the time frames like what do I need to do now to create enough space and time to do something better so that you can actually live both now, but also like kind of the next phase as well.
And so it's a powerful because of every round of a fast moving company is it can be an existential and the next existential challenge you face and the ability to move through those in a really powerful ways is really helpful. We have so many more questions to try to squeeze in before we close up one more follow question about room and attention.
How have you identified things that you are uniquely capable of doing for somebody assessing where do I spend my time. That is such a powerful concept to zero in on when you're identifying opportunity. And so I think that we're a focus on leadership roles both again technical and kind of managerial leadership roles that there should be stuff like if you look around like no one else can really do or they can't do it nearly as well as you can.
And you know long term what you want to do is you want to figure out how to make that not be true or how do I grow other people who can have these same abilities and experiences so they can do this instead of me. And the moment that's not true and so I think looking around and understanding where this gap might be so a good example of this might be like a hiring process. If you're a manager or a senior manager, probably the only person who can change your engineering hiring process is you.
So you either need to like if this is something that actually needs to be improvement as I guess the first one and you can think about some metrics around like the process, etc. But if this is something that's important then either you need to do it or you need to explicitly figure out how to create space for someone else to do it and like see your authority to someone else to work on this topic.
And so I think on the technical side, I think often with the people who are the only approver or the only trusted approver for a given piece of code or given like style of change every database migration needs to go through the senior engineer who's the only person who's like trusted to review them or something like that. And so I think in that case like one only you can do that work today and so making sure you actually do that work to block the broader system.
But then also you're really the only person who can fix that so that more people can do it. And so making sure that any working to see that only you can do is like structurally like a weakness and then the most important meta working and do is like making that not be true. And then you like pause you look around again and do it the same thing over and this can be you know lots of categories of work, but I think API design.
Often you'll be have like one or two people at a company where the only people who can do like proved API design. Large architectural changes like a move to a new database and you service strategy or something like that. Availability strategy, something like that on the management side like definitely hiring to huge one performance management is another huge one compensation is another huge one where typically there's only one ish person can actually think about the sort of thing.
And you need to be like doing it yourself because no one else can or I'm being a way to actually make room for someone else. And so I think that many people can do like sourcing most types of candidates, but if you're trying to hire like a really senior person, it's way more effective to have the CTO the VP of entry into that reach out. So that's a good example of something that you could look at one way is okay, there's something anyone can do.
But really no one else can attract and excite like the most senior talent the way you as the senior mostly during your function can. And so I think that's one more thing to that list of dimension that is only you can improve or make yourself a better leader. So sitting outside time to reflect and investing yourself because many leader are so busy doing all the other things and not leaving time for improving on you best back to themselves.
I think that's a great one. I was talking to someone about a mutual acquaintance and they their comment was like, oh, they've gotten hard to work with. So busy that they're like pretty miserable to talk to at this point. And I think a lot of us are not bringing like our best selves to work and unfortunately we're getting there because we're trying so hard to be helpful or trying so hard to do the right thing.
We're going to have an impact that we actually really become much worse at the work we're doing than if we were doing enough less that we have the energy to actually do a good job of what's still there. So I wanted to ask you one more question and I also wanted to make sure that we had time to talk about your upcoming new book.
The last question follows some of the things you mentioned around seating authority where I think this might be the opposite of that which is the concept you talk about with lending privilege as a leader or as a high level person within your company. The concept of lending privilege has some huge opportunities for benefiting the engineering industry as a whole. And so I was wondering if you talk a little bit about what does it mean to do that and how do you think about that.
So I just put up an interview with Aaron Suggs who's a principal engineer at Glossier and he called he said one of the things he does that's really impactful is being a frequent first follower. And so for oftentimes you'll have someone who's like, hey, I think we should do something, but people won't like mobilize around the idea until someone who's perceived to be important or influential is like that's a great idea.
And so what he called being a frequent first follower is exactly what I mean in a lot of cases around lending privilege where there's something that someone is already doing. And so this can't make headway on it. It might be that if you want to like buy like a thousand dollars of something like the experience of doing that if you are an executive is you like way that the F P and A person like hey we're definitely buying this.
And then if you're an engineer or you might go through like four weeks of like vendor approvals or something right. And so organizations you know quit a lot of structure to prevent change. But it's easy to often like not notice it as you were senior because you're exempt from it. And I like well, it's actually pretty easy to get something to prove it is for me, but it's definitely not on average.
And so like looking at folks who are doing great work, but are just stuck in the systems that we kind of have embroiled them in and obviously if we can we should try to fix this so like it's not so onerous for everyone to do work. And so it's really challenging right if you think about like vendor selection. There's a lot of like negative externalities to accompany for each additional vendor they bring on.
And so they really don't want to make it easy to bring on a lot more vendors so like saying we should fix the process is like not even clear what that means. Should you have more or fewer like it actually who knows. And so what you do in that moment is like seeing a project that you believe is really important and someone's leading it they're just getting stuck somewhere on these processes or systems and you can go lend your privilege like help cut through all of that.
And you know sometimes it's things like process, but often it's not process related. It's like convincing a couple of the longer time engineers who don't like to change the systems much really are comfortable with how they work. And sometimes like talking to them about why we should take some risks and why even if it fails to try a different way it's still better than not trying a different way at all.
I hope people get like time prioritized you can bring some attention like in terms of like things that have room and attention like attention can be created particularly if you're senior you can create attention. If someone's doing some work the company doesn't value can go like just chime into their managers like hey notice so and so is doing like using work I think this is really important.
And all of a sudden like this task that all the seven had room but no attention has like room and some attention and those are some of the ways to create privilege. I do think this is extremely high impact work that is easy to do once you start looking for it. But a lot of folks I think just don't think about it and just lose out on this like amazing way to be really impactful that is is pretty quick.
Thank you we know you have a new book coming out staff engineering leadership beyond the management track. Tell us a little bit more about the book why do you write it and what is the impact that you want it to have. Yeah so this is not a pretty fun project I think really benefited from a huge number of folks who've been willing to share their stories with with me about their experiences.
But when I look at the industry I think one of the most frequent problems I hear from managers is like hey I don't know how to coach my senior engineers like my staff my principal my distinguished engineers. And then they're like hey like I just don't feel like my staff engineers like working at the level I want them to.
And then you're like kind of this dissatisfaction and often like a distrust of their senior like engineers and then you talk to the senior engineers like hey I can't get in the rooms to actually be involved in conversations. I have no authority because the managers like keep all the authority there's really important work that I know needs to be done. But no one's listening to me about why we need to do it.
And I think you can kind of look at those and it's a mess but I think it's a mess like largely due to a lack of understanding of what the role is. And the lack of like resources about how to build some of the skills to do their role. I feel really quite like sad in some sense for the folks who whose managers are trying to coach them but I just never worked with someone in a role like this before. Or folks who are the first staff engineer at a company and haven't done it before themselves.
Like I feel like they're basically abandoned to like imagine what the role is from scratch. And so my hope is that creating a resource like this that you can like learn from other folks of how the roles work and learn a little bit from that. I think there's this idea of architects being like terrible people. There's no title in the industry like more widely hated than architects. And it's like architects is actually a really useful role.
And a lot of the folks I spoke to are in architecture roles but not label this architecture typically because there's this like sigma around it. But I really think this is like a role we want. And that's just one kind of archetype of staff engineer but we sort of like bling for poor execution on the concepts. And here in architects is a beautiful idea that's incredibly high impact. We've just done it fairly poorly and then pretended it can't be done well.
My hope that we start getting a lot more folks and senior roles who we trust and we empower. And who we then hold accountable for the work we're doing. And so that's sort of my hope for the project and you know we'll see where it goes. I don't know if I'll quite get there but that's the dream.
And I think it's wonderful and really excited for people to dive into your book. Well I think all of us are on a quest to figure out how we better use our time on the finite amount of time that we have on this planet. And so just thank you for spending your time helping us better optimize and focus on the things that actually matter. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
I'm going to go to the station with Will Larson and want to dive deeper into many of these concepts. Follow will on Twitter at Lephane. Check out his blog, irrational exuberance and be sure to check out Will's new book. Staff engineering leadership beyond the management track. We have links to all of those things in the show notes. Here's a quick recap of our takeaways from our conversation with Will Larson.
Where do most people go wrong with how they spend their time? Don't focus on urgent short term things to the exclusion of more important longer term things that aren't on the planet. Be intentional with your time. Do the calendar review. I personally love the quote. Show me your calendar and I'll show you your priorities. Put your priorities on the calendar and strive to eliminate or delegate the less important short term work.
Here are a few traps to look out for. Where are you snacking? Find where you might be doing the easy comforting short term but low impact work. Confront the opportunity cost and refocus your limited time and attention on high impact work. Where are you preening? Identify the actions in your teams that are promoting highly visible but low value work. Change what you celebrate, recognize or reward to align with work that's higher value.
For engineering leaders, if you're solving problems yourself, instead of finding the right structure and people to solve those problems for you, you just might be preening. Focus on delegating decisions by promoting trust and creating clarity on where those decisions need to be made.
Are you chasing ghosts? Assess if you're projecting your familiarity onto a problem because it makes you feel comfortable and more knowledgeable than others or assess if it's actually solving the current needs and be honest and hold yourself accountable if you're not. How can you reduce status chasing in your teams? When things aren't clear, people assign status to random things, understand where you can better clarify titles, roles or responsibilities.
And the easiest way to disincentivize any behavior is to make sure that behavior requires a lot of work. So ensure that status requires a lot of work or adds a lot of value. Remember, busyness is not mandatory. It's a choice. It just might not be yours. Find the person who's making that choice to make you busy and learn why. Once you understand the system and choices, you can change them.
So now that you've identified the traps, how do you decide what you should actually work on? Find the existential issues. What are the things you absolutely must do? The things you cannot live without without harming your business immensely? How can you identify and anticipate future existential issues? Try using the iterative elimination tournament. As you compare different approaches, think about the different time frames.
What do you need to do now that's good enough and also gives you room and space for something better in the next phase? Identify where there's room and attention. What are priorities that will become critical in the future where you can do good work ahead of time? What are the things only you can do that have the greatest impact? And where are things okay but maybe could be great with your support?
Finally, a fast way to build momentum is to find the high impact places where you can lend privilege to another person or project and create attention to get that project unstuck. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a fellow engineering leader. Also, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a message with your thoughts, feedback, and any ideas you might have for the show.
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