@Lethain
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lethain.com Self-reinforcing quality / adopting verification pattern After implementing the small-change pattern, Imprint Engineering’s next focus in improving our development loop has been implementing a verification loop for our software development. This is an... What’s changed in “the unwritten rules” of engineering management since the 2010s, why are hands-on managers “back”, and what has it done to the engineer-to-CTO career path? With Will Larson (@Lethain). Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
08:20 Stories from Yahoo!
12:47 Digg’s v4 rewrite: the insider story
26:02 Will’s path to eng leadership
30:03 Uber, Stripe, Carta, and Calm
35:11 What does a CTO do?
38:09 Will’s role at Imprint
42:48 How engineering management has evolved
51:08 ZIRP’s impact on tech
57:21 Career ladders
1:01:03 Eng 1 vs Eng 2
1:06:58 How software engineering roles are changing
1:16:25 Revised rules of engineering leadership
1:21:57 The risks of becoming a bureaucrat as an EM
1:25:57 How to become a CTO?
1:31:33 Middle management vs. line management
1:41:36 Will’s writing
1:52:13 Book recommendations
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Two sage observations from Will on how engineering management changed:
1. ZIRP shaped engineering management practices in the 2010s, Will believes. As he put it:
“Back then, your ability to hire and close and retain became the differentiator between successful companies. The less successful ones simply couldn’t retain great people.
[This dynamic on hiring and retaining] pulled leverage back into the engineer’s hands and created a very different environment. So, companies were pitching themselves as a more relaxed environment, more focused on you, and offering more career development. And I think in ways that I think were often kind of self-defeating.”
2. Blunt message for middle managers: retire or re-skill.
Will left a team of 250 at Carta to head up 25 tech people at Imprint. He purposely took a “step back” in his leadership career because he believes things are changing so radically that the engineering leadership profession that we know will not exist in three years.
Amid all this, Will says that line management can be a lot more engaging for executives these days because the tools for line management and the tools for writing software are really good. Plus, the tech industry has always been volatile: during the 2010s most of us simply forgot about this!View quoted post on X
