There are many important meetings in your first ninety days as a new engineering leader, but one that’s both easy to forget and surprisingly important is your first meeting with the finance team. There’s a lot to learn from the finance team, particularly drilling into your profit and loss statement, but there’s one narrow topic that causes a surprising amount of frustration between engineering and finance teams: how do you capitalize software engineering costs?| lethain.com
Over the past 19 months, I’ve written Crafting Engineering Strategy, a book on creating engineering strategy. I’ve also been working increasingly with large language models at work. Unsurprisingly, the intersection of those two ideas is a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot. What, I’ve wondered, is the role of the author, particularly the long-form author, in a world where an increasingly large percentage of writing is intermediated by large language models?| 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
Shortly after a senior leader joins a new company, sometimes you’ll notice them quickly steer the organization towards a total architectural rewrite. Perhaps this is a switch from batch to streaming computation, perhaps a switch from a monolith to a services architecture, perhaps it’s a rewrite into a new programming language. If you take a few minutes to reflect, I bet you can identify several times where you’ve had this experience. Regardless of the proposed technical change, it’s a...| lethain.com
Even if you believe that strategy is generally useful, it is difficult to decide that today’s the day to start writing engineering strategy. When you do start writing strategy, it’s easy write so much strategy that your organization is overwhelmed and ignores your strategy rather than investing time into understanding it. Fortunately, these are universal problems, and there are a handful of useful mental models to avoid both extremes. This chapter covers:| lethain.com
For a long time, the path to engineering manager began with a prolonged stint of technical leadership. Then you’d transition into an initial management role that balanced people and technical responsibilities. Some companies call this a tech lead manager role. Folks entering those sorts of managerial roles were often the senior-most technical contributor on their team. If they struggled with the transition, many of them would fall back into the familiar habit of technical leadership instead...| lethain.com
Inspired by some discussion on Hacker News about whether it was a bad career move to switch from “CTO” to “developer”, I want to talk about CTOs. Specifically, CTO is not a real job and you should likely not aspire to be one1 especially if you view yourself as primarily someone who sticks to engineering career ladders, either as a manager or as an individual contributor. TLDR: Don’t trust anyone who’s a “CTO” that’s not a technical cofounder.| dadrian.io