Substrate

it can be a difficult transition from essential to adjacent. ​ This transition requires learning to deliberately create space for the team around you, and comes down to actively involving them in discussions, decisions, and ultimately substituting sponsorship for repeating the successes that got you to Staff in the first place. ​ When you make a key contribution, feel good about it, and then think about what needs to happen for someone else to make that contribution next time. ​ Be the one to take notes, this helps destigmatize note taking as “low status” and also frees up an alternative would-be notetaker to contribute more instead. ​ If you need a rule of thumb, keep a sponsorship journal and ensure you’re sponsoring others at least a few times a month – if you find yourself sponsoring less frequently than that, dig into what’s stopping you.

My writing pace accelerates whenever I find myself in a learning rich environment, which is why I wrote so much in my first two years out of school and over the past three years at Stripe. ​ but even more important for me is that Stripe Press is a bit unusual: they typically buy completed manuscripts, rather than proposals. This gave me an extraordinary amount of latitude in my approach to writing, the book’s format and marketing the book. ​ I am truly amazed by folks who are able to write when raising young children, caring for their parents, or otherwise committed: it takes a great deal of privilege to write a book. ​ and I’m deeply grateful that I’ve gotten to do it. So far, I think the hardest bit will be a small sense of loss after it all quiets down, e.g. the return to normalcy. ​ If I wrote another book, I would spend more time outline in detail to build the small pieces more intentionally over the course of the book. _whispers: “composition”_ Honest feedback is very hard to find when writing a book, since you have to find (a) someone who will give hard feedback, and (b) someone who is willing to read your book. That’s a small intersection.

Some of the ideas are a bit contradictory, which I suspect is the nature of all useful advice: you’ll have to work through the conflicts and details yourself. One of the reasons I write online is so that folks can discover me, and being discoverable has lead to many of the best things in my life. if you stay somewhere that you’re very comfortable for too long, then you’re missing out on so much future growth.

Managers should support 6-8 engineers. ​ Tech Lead Managers (TLMs). Managers supporting less than four engineers tend to function as TLMs, taking on a share of design and implementation work. For some folks this role can uniquely leverage their strengths, but it's a role with limited career opportunities. To progress as a manager, they'll want more time to focus developing their management skills. Alternatively to progress towards staff engineering roles, they'll find it difficult to spend enough time in the technical details. ​ Most folks find being oncall for components they're unfamiliar with to be disproportionately stressful. ​ An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. ​ and avoid creating a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.

Of the early Stripe lore I’ve encountered, my favorite is that it managed to accomplish a tremendous amount with a small team because folks moved so rapidly from one project to another project that, leaving an afterimage behind them, it appeared that they were everywhere simultaneously.

The core observations from Fred Brook’s The Mythical Man Month is that assigning more folks to work on a project often slows down delivery. Part of that is the predictability tax.