Two or three years into a role, you may find that your personal rate of learning has trailed off. You know your team well, the industry particulars are no longer quite as intimidating, the mystery of getting things done at your company solved. This can be a sign to start looking for your next role, but it’s also a great opportunity to build experience with succession planning.| lethain.com
Long term, I believe that your career will be largely defined by getting lucky and the rate at which you learn. I have no advice about luck, but to speed up learning I have two suggestions: work at a rapidly expanding company, and make your peers your first team.| lethain.com
Along with slow technical migrations, I believe reorganizations are the second largest activity which cause quickly growing companies to slow down. Here is a framework for running an engineering reorg effectively.| lethain.com
At the core of Uber’s service migration strategy (2014) is understanding the service onboarding process, and identifying the levers to speed up that process. Here we’ll develop a system model representing that onboarding process, and exercise the model to test a number of hypotheses about how to best speed up provisioning. In this chapter, we’ll cover: Where the model of service onboarding suggested we focus on efforts Developing a system model using the lethain/systems package on Githu...| lethain.com
While I was probably late to learn the concept of strategy testing, I might have learned about systems modeling too early in my career, stumbling on Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer before I began my career in software. Over the years, I’ve discovered a number of ways to miuse systems modeling, but it remains the most effective, flexible tool I’ve found to debugging complex problems. In this chapter, we’ll work through:| lethain.com
Occasionally folks tell me that I should “write full time.” I’ve thought about this a lot, and have rejected that option because I believe that writers who operate (e.g. write concurrently with holding a non-writing industry role) are best positioned to keep writing valuable work that advances the industry. This is a lightly controversial view, so I wanted to pull together my full set of thoughts on the topic. The themes I want to work through are:| lethain.com
The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains, but either way they are absolutely the protagonists. Working within the industry, I’ve worked with quite a few non-protagonists who experience their time in technology differently: a period of obligatory toil required to pry open the gate to the American Dream.| lethain.com
Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known. Similarly, when funding is readily available during periods of tech industry expansion, many companies believe they are principally constrained by their hiring velocity–if their engineering organization’s brand was just a bit better, they believe they’d be hiring much faster.| lethain.com
Several years ago, my friend Bobby showed me an article about a CEO who used systems thinking to understand their company’s bottlenecks, which eventually lead to him buying out his cofounder, who had been leading their sales team. As is the case for most stories about ourselves that we decide to publish widely, this decision turned out to be the right one, and their business flourished.| lethain.com
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. This post takes a look at why migrations are so important, and also how to run them effectively.| lethain.com
I've been thinking recently about how to discover and hire great engineers in the hottest job market in decades. One of the biggest hurdles to hiring good engineers, and especially experienced engineers, is that they're so. unbelievably. expensive.| Ken Kantzer's Blog
This document grew out of our internal “questions to ask during code review” checklist: we realized that if we turned the questions into advice, it made a great summary of what we think makes code great. We’re publishing it here so that if you’re interested in working at Wave, you can see whether your taste meshes with ours–and if you’re interviewing, you can see how you’ll be evaluated. Ship. We succeed by learning new things, and we learn by shipping.| www.wave.com