In my early career roles, I worked at companies that never worried about their infrastructure costs at all. They were simply too low a cost and growing too slowly for the Finance team to pay much attention to it. This “ignore it until it’s too large to ignore” approach served me well. Until it didn’t. Working at Uber, I was caught me off guard when a new Director joined and overnight infrastructure costs were recategorized from insignificant to requiring urgent, detailed review every ...| infraeng.dev
Fork the org growth template and the org design template. Having been involved in quite a few budget and headcount processes over the years, one thing that continues to surprise me is how often folks make major headcount requests without having done any organzational design of those those requested heads will compose into an organization. The good news is that the high-level sort of organizational design required for headcount planning is abstract, low granularity, and it’ll likely only tak...| Infrastructure Engineering
Fork this template on Google Docs It’s impossible to avoid headcount planning when running a large team within an engineering organization. On the other hand, many folks find it’s impossible to be usefully involved in headcount planning when the folks running the process aren’t closely involved with your work: Infrastructure? Oh, that’s going great: no crashes or breaches lately, we don’t need to invest here!| Infrastructure Engineering
Fork this template on Google Sheets At some point in your planning process, you’re going to get a headcount target. It’s tempting to immediately jump into allocating that headcount–we’re going to do so much this year–but it’s helpful to take an hour to model out recruiting capacity to understand whether your headcount target is realistic. Once you’ve gone through the exercise, you’ll finish with a simple chart that shows your progress over the year towards that headcount targe...| Infrastructure Engineering