Will Larson
Engineering leader and writer; wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive's Primer, and blogs at Irrational Exuberance.
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What they believe
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A sustainable on-call rotation needs seven or eight engineers.
Oncall rotations want 8 engineers. For production oncall responsibilities, I’ve found that two-tier 24/7 support requires eight folks.
lethain.comSaid 14 Jul 2018This on korrents
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Changed their mind Innovation should happen inside the existing teams rather than in a fresh team spun up for it, because a separate innovation team creates a two-tier class system.
Now I’ve historically done this myself, but I’ve moved towards innovating within existing teams.
Said 14 Jul 2018This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These one: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 11 beliefs, 1 changed mind — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
A sustainable on-call rotation needs seven or eight engineers.
Oncall rotations want 8 engineers. For production oncall responsibilities, I’ve found that two-tier 24/7 support requires eight folks.
Sizing engineering teams. Said 14 Jul 2018
An engineering manager should support six to eight engineers: fewer and they drift into being a tech lead, more and they can only be a coach.
Managers should support 6-8 engineers. This gives them enough time for active coaching, coordinating and furthering their team’s mission by writing strategies, leading change, and so on.
Sizing engineering teams. Said 14 Jul 2018
A group of fewer than four people is not a team: it behaves like a set of individuals, and a single departure knocks it back into maintenance.
Small teams (<4) are not teams. I’ve sponsored quite a few 1-2 person teams, and each time I’ve regretted it. To repeat: I have regretted it every single time.
Sizing engineering teams. Said 14 Jul 2018
Show 8 more
New teams should be budded off an existing team grown deliberately large, never created empty and staffed afterwards.
To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two teams of four or five. Never create empty teams.
Sizing engineering teams. Said 14 Jul 2018
Innovation tends to come from slack time away from firefighting, not from being fully utilized.
In this case, it’s to maintain enough slack in your team’s schedule that the team can build quality into their work, and operating continuously in innovation, and avoid backtracking.
Staying on the path to high performing teams. Said 17 Jun 2018
A team that is falling behind can only be fixed by hiring more people; no amount of process or patience will move it.
When falling behind, the system fix is to hire more people until the team moves into treading water.
Staying on the path to high performing teams. Said 17 Jun 2018
Fixing an understaffed team by moving people off other teams does not work, because people are not fungible and the argument inevitably turns political.
People are not fungible, and generally folks end up in useful places, so I’m skeptical of reassigning existing folks to drive optimality.
Staying on the path to high performing teams. Said 17 Jun 2018
Spreading scarce hiring evenly across every team that needs it is indecision dressed as fairness; staff one team to health at a time.
Many folks try to move all teams at the same time, peanut buttering their limited resources, but resist that indecision-framed-as-fairness: no one getting anything is not a fair outcome.
Staying on the path to high performing teams. Said 17 Jun 2018
A team should grow in bursts followed by periods of consolidation, because continuous hiring never lets it gel.
Adding new folks to a team disrupts that team’s gelling process, so I’ve found it much easier to have rapid growth periods for any given team followed by consolidation/gelling periods where the team gels.
Staying on the path to high performing teams. Said 17 Jun 2018
Organisational fixes are slow because they have to drain years of accumulated state, and that same slowness is what makes them durable once they take.
This is because systems accumulate months or years of state, and you have to drain that all away. Conversely, the same properties that make them slow to fix make them extremely durable once in effect!
Staying on the path to high performing teams. Said 17 Jun 2018
Past a certain hiring rate the marginal value of another engineer falls towards nothing, because training and interviewing consume the engineers you already have.
this is where the oft raised concern that hiring is slowing us down comes from: at high enough rates, the marginal added value of hiring gets very slow, especially if your training process is weak.
Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. Said 10 Oct 2016
Beliefs others hold too
A sustainable on-call rotation needs seven or eight engineers. 2 hold this
Oncall rotations want 8 engineers. For production oncall responsibilities, I’ve found that two-tier 24/7 support requires eight folks.
Sizing engineering teams. Said 14 Jul 2018
Innovation tends to come from slack time away from firefighting, not from being fully utilized. 2 hold this
In this case, it’s to maintain enough slack in your team’s schedule that the team can build quality into their work, and operating continuously in innovation, and avoid backtracking.
Staying on the path to high performing teams. Said 17 Jun 2018
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 15 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Liked Top Chef
something I do still watch is Top Chef with my wife she's a Top Chef Super Fan and there's something just like very relaxing from like this formulaic structured shows where you kind of know what's going to happen there's no real consequences that that matter too much and just kind of escaping from real life to these like formulas can be pretty pretty peaceful
youtube.com 7 Jan 2024
Loved The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company
This book opened my eyes to just how thoughtful many companies are in intentionally growing new leadership.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company →
Recommends Designing with the Mind in Mind
An introduction to usability and design, grounding both in how the brain works.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
Show 12 more
Recommends Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach
Permission to be a leader that builds on your strengths, not whatever model that folks think you should fit into.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach →
Recommends Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time
How to say what you need to say, particularly powerful in giving structure to get past conflict aversion.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
Loved The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
A look at how being hyper-rational in the short-run has led many great companies to failure. These days I think about this constantly when doing strategic planning.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail →
Recommends Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
A thoughtful approach to product management.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love →
Loved Finite and Infinite Games
Success in most life situations is about letting everyone continue to play, not about zero-sum outcomes. This seems pretty obvious, but for me it helped reset my sense of why I work.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
Recommends The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Explores how constraint-theory can be used to optimize process.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement →
Loved Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters
This book gave me permission to acknowledge that many strategies I've seen professionally are not very good, and a structured approach to writing good strategies
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters →
Loved The Mythical Man-Month
The first professional book I ever read, opening my eyes to the wealth of software engineering literature waiting out there.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
Recommends Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
Documents a compelling case for middle managers as the critical layer where organizational memory rests and learning occurs. A meditation on the gap between efficiency and effectiveness.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency →
Recommends Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
The book that has given generations of developers permission to speak on the challenges of space planning and open offices. Particularly powerful in grounding the discussion in data.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams →
Loved Don't Think of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
While written from a political perspective that some might find challenging, this book completely changed how I think about presenting ideas. You may be tempted to instead read his more academic writing, but I'd recommend reading this first as it's much briefer and more readable.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
What others say about Don't Think of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate →
Loved Thinking in Systems: A Primer
For me, systems thinking has been the most effective universal tool for reasoning through complex problems, and this book is a readable, powerful introduction.
lethain.com 24 Jul 2018
Where they publish
Blog Irrational Exuberance His blog on engineering strategy, management and infrastructure. Has a feed.
Recent
- Self-reinforcing quality / adopting verification pattern 30 Oct 2026 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 increasingly commo…
- Speeding up code review with `small-change` 17 Oct 2026 Imprint’s average engineer is merging 4x more PRs than 2 years ago. Yay. Aggregated behind the average is something even more interesting: we have two teams that are merging 10x their PRs over that period. One eng…
- Trying the Software Factory pattern. 20 Sept 2026 One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I’d mi…
Show 8 more
- Roadmap decisions rather than dates. 11 Aug 2026 One thing that bothered me about Imprint’s product after joining was our lack of passkey support. Passkey support is a rare opportunity to increase resiliency to phishing attacks while simultaneously reducing logi…
- Middle management roles are also a trap. 8 Aug 2026 Six years ago, I wrote Tech Lead Management roles are a trap. My argument then was that TLM roles present themselves as easier than moving into a full management role, but the tension between doing the software engineer…
- Generated and suppressed demand. 11 Jul 2026 Eight years ago, I wrote about my theory of restoring struggling teams, which came down to four steps: A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than the week before. Solve by hiring more. A team is…
- Make no assumptions. 11 Jul 2026 I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the concept of “soil horizons”, which is the idea that there are many distinct layers of soil, from topsoil all the way down to bedrock, which all combine into a…
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. 15 Jun 2026 From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature of hypergrowth is that your mistakes reveal themselves next month rath…
- Early and late-stage hypergrowth. 27 Apr 2026 Last week, a colleague asked why I’d hired an additional new leader onto an important area rather than expanding an existing leader’s scope to incorporate that area as well. The existing leader was a known q…
- Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks. 12 Apr 2026 One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized. For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improving how humans collaborate, but that quickly switched to figuring out h…
- The agentic passive voice. 29 Mar 2026 At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice, where the actor in a sentence is unclear. For example, my software didn’t compile. That’s a good example of the passive voice. However, you might…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Bluesky @lethain.com Their Bluesky account.
Recent
- Wrote up a series of nine short posts on interesting problems we encountered while building an internal agent framework (virtual files, compaction, LLM vs code-driven workflows, etc) 2 Jan 2026 lethain.com
- Digital edition of my fourth book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, is up for purchase! (Print copy should start shipping in next 2-3 weeks.) Tried to apply "Staff Engineer" formula to eng strategy topic, with a lot more editing 😂 25 Oct 2025 amazon.com
- Any good patterns for loading a Notion page as modifiable prompt to respond to other Notion pages and Slack messages? Eg as a simple example you could imagine I want to write architecture guidelines and then use that to comment on RFCs. Is this just Zapier? 20 Jul 2025
Show 17 more
- Did my first podcast in some time as I start ramping up a bit around getting started as new CTO at Imprint and also getting close to releasing next book! Podcast up at 16 Jun 2025 executiveruntime.show
- Over the last year, as I've spent more time working with LLMs to power product features, I've also been thinking about how LLMs impact me as a long-form author. Of the ideas I've had, I'm particularly interested in the idea of building, and selling, books as "datapacks" for LLMs. 14 Jun 2025
- Still only part way through the editing process, but excited to announce Crafting Engineering Strategy, my upcoming book with O'Reilly on engineering strategy coming later this year (sometime Q4). 12 Jun 2025
- My bi-decade update on my desk setup 😂 Finally found a dock that lets me swap from windows desktop with dedicated GPU to OSX laptop with a single thunderbolt cable! 7 Jun 2025 lethain.com
- Looking for startup to angel invest in that solves problem of chairs being routinely positioned to block video cameras in office meeting rooms. (I've tried petitioning to remove chairs from rooms, but this innovation has met substantial resistance, so we need to innovate here.) 22 May 2025
- Each time I open LinkedIn I pray I don’t somehow accidentally click on the brain teaser game and become shamed forever off the internet 21 May 2025
- This time experimenting with MCP server for generating and running systems models ( github.com/lethain/syst... ). I think it's pretty wild how well this works, especially the tool to inject domain-specific language usage documentation into the context window. 10 May 2025
- Got to zero inbox on my personal email address(es) for the first time in a decade or so. This was mostly (1) declaring bankrupt on anything older than 6 months, (2) unsubscribing/filtering spammy stuff, and (3) setting up a transient tag for emails I want to *briefly* see 5 May 2025 lethain.com
- Another writing workflow tool I've found useful is using LLM API to describe images. Here's is an example of script that replaces empty image descriptions with reasonably good ones. To extent the images could be better, it's b/c my prompt needs some work 22 Apr 2025 gist.github.com
- Threw together an MCP for navigating Markdown knowledge bases (e.g. recursive folders with markdown files with markdown headers). Very basic, and very vibe-coded, but works well and interesting learning experience 21 Apr 2025 github.com
- Love this post from @keavym.bsky.social, really captures the right hand archetype of staff-plus engineer (ty to @kstewart.bsky.social who reminded me of Keavy's post) 20 Apr 2025 keavy.com
- Small weekend project, I finally moved staffeng.com from Gatsby to Hugo. Gatsby is just fairly hard to maintain with so many JS dependencies for something I don't update frequently. Now actually possible to fix issues again 😅 20 Apr 2025
- This one worked exceptionally well to create an SEO-driving FAQ page for page for new book. Done in a Claude workspace with entire book loaded into project via some light preprocessing plus repomix of all Markdown files. 13 Apr 2025
- So... should I make all the systems models look like Figma diagrams or Excalidraw diagrams? And why? 6 Apr 2025
- Now working on visual consistency of images for strategy book. One shot prompted a very simple script to build a static HTML page showing every image and descriptions used in the book. This is just a subset of the ~50 images overall, but gives a sense of starting point / problem to be solved. 6 Apr 2025
- Still enjoying my very basic, vibe coded typo/grammar fixer for blog posts 😂 17 Mar 2025
- The one where everyone’s GitHub actions turned out to be exfiltrating their secrets 15 Mar 2025 cve.org
Link verified 23 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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