Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them...| lethain.com
Many hypergrowth companies of the 2010s battled increasing complexity in their codebase by decomposing their monoliths. Stripe was somewhat of an exception, largely delaying decomposition until it had grown beyond three thousand engineers and had accumulated a decade of development in its core Ruby monolith. Even now, significant portions of their product are maintained in the monolithic repository, and it’s safe to say this was only possible because of Sorbet’s impact.| lethain.com
A surprising number of strategies are doomed from inception because their authors get attached to one particular approach without considering alternatives that would work better for their current circumstances. This happens when engineers want to pick tools solely because they are trending, and when executives insist on adopting the tech stack from their prior organization where they felt comfortable. Exploration is the antidote to early anchoring, forcing you to consider the problem widely b...| lethain.com
In early 2014, I joined as an engineering manager for Uber’s Infrastructure team. We were responsible for a wide number of things, including provisioning new services. While the overall team I led grew significantly over time, the subset working on service provisioning never grew beyond four engineers. Those four engineers successfully migrated 1,000+ services onto a new, future-proofed service platform. More importantly, they did it while absorbing the majority, although certainly not the ...| lethain.com
In Jim Collins’ Great by Choice, he develops the concept of Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs. His premise is that you should cheaply test new ideas before fully committing to them. Your organization can only afford firing a small number of cannonballs, but it can bankroll far more bullets. Why not use bullets to derisk your cannonballs’ trajectories? This chapter presents a series of concrete techniques that I have personally used to effectively refine strategies before reaching the cannonb...| lethain.com
This is a work-in-progress draft! Even the very best policies fail if they aren’t adopted by the teams they’re intended to serve. In my experience, it’s common for a thoughtful strategy to be ruined by a terrible rollout strategy. Can we persistently change our company’s behaviors with a one-time announcement? No, probably not. The good news is that effectively operating a policy doesn’t have to be magic. There are common patterns that take time and attention, but I’ve seen them w...| lethain.com
In 2020, you could credibly argue that ZIRP explains the world, but that’s an impossible argument to make in 2024 when zero-interest rate policy is only a fond memory. Instead, we’re seeing a number of companies designed for rapid expansion learning to adapt to a world that expects immediate free cash flow rather than accepting the sweet promise of discounted future cash flow. This chapter wants to tackle that problem head-on, taking the role of an engineering organization attempting to n...| lethain.com
If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be that prematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective. Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe your strategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive) or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). Neither is particular helpful.| lethain.com
