A lot of folks want a map to Staff Engineer, and just as many Staff Engineers want to better understand their role. Towards that end, I'm working on a small project to collect folks' stories of reaching and operating as staff-plus engineers
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Synthesized notes from my own experience capitalizing software costs and the thoughts from this thread into lethain.com/capitalize-eng
Def curious if I missed anythign!
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What process does your engineering team use for the capitalization vs expensing process with finance? I've seen everything from "tickets for every work item" to "team affinity to innovation/maintenance" to "ignore it until we go public" and all seem bad.
What is better way?!
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The future is here! (This repository never existed.)
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Some quick notes on setting up Tailscale: it's quite good, delightful setup, def an interesting infra product to learn from, and very curious to see how they work to move upmarket over next few years
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I hate meetings as much as anyone. I tend to think meetings are more misunderstood than abused—a misunderstanding of what they are good for and general expectations.
For me the key element of meetings is that they are where and how culture is built and reinforced. 1/3
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What process does your engineering team use for the capitalization vs expensing process with finance? I've seen everything from "tickets for every work item" to "team affinity to innovation/maintenance" to "ignore it until we go public" and all seem bad.
What is better way?!
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I think the biggest blocker for going down this path is people start thinking about measuring outputs without understanding the inputs first. If you start with measuring outputs, the whole process is going to feel like magic and that makes the entire thing feel unobtainable.
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This is a fantastic article. I cannot recommend the "Using optimization metrics to judge performance" antipattern enough. It's your job as an engineering leader to avoid going that route. It's different to operate a MariaDB cluster than an API that receives 5 rqps.
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"What should I measure when the CEO asks for engineering metrics?" is probably the most frequently recurring eng leadership question, and connects into a larger, somewhat nebulous topic: how should you measure engineering organizations?
Some notes! lethain.com/measuring-engi
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Finally, I also find many companies have cargo-culted measurement ("Amazon measures, so we should too"), but measurement is only valuable if you actually inspect the data is accurate, generally by building and endlessly refining an accurate mental model about what the data means
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The biggest challenge with answering this question directly imo is that there are a number of different stakeholders who all want very different things, and literal attempts to answer usually get artificially anchored on one of those stakeholders rather than solving for whole set
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"What should I measure when the CEO asks for engineering metrics?" is probably the most frequently recurring eng leadership question, and connects into a larger, somewhat nebulous topic: how should you measure engineering organizations?
Some notes! lethain.com/measuring-engi
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Love this insight from --
"Under pressure, most people retreat to their area of highest perceived historical impact, even if it isn’t very relevant to today's problems"
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Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli recently spoke at a Barclays Global Tech conference
Here's what he had to say about the state of Snowflake's business and how the weakening economy is impacting cloud vendors
I'm a shareholder, so I've included a basic DCF analysis at the end
$SNOW
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Here's my 2022 in review: Traveling, learning and writing, going from L5 -> L6, giving a keynote at RecSys, and starting a machine learning meetup. Also, site and channel stats and goals for 2023.
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Olha os times da adotando ULIDs em vez de UUIDs (v4) para armazenar Idempotency Keys 😬
"In one high-throughput system at Shopify we’ve seen a 50 percent decrease in INSERT statement duration by switching from UUIDv4 to ULID for idempotency keys"
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if you're looking for things to spend your 2022 professional development budget on before the year ends: my new zine on debugging came out yesterday! twitter.com/b0rk/status/16
(also you can get a 12-pack of all my zines!)
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It's here!! My new zine "The Pocket Guide to Debugging" is out now!! It has 47 pages of my favourite strategies for solving your sneakiest bugs. 
Get it here for $12: wizardzines.com/zines/debuggin
Get it here for $12: wizardzines.com/zines/debugginShow this thread
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Hoping to create a group to improve my thinking on these topics, and also the results back to the group itself to make it valuable for participants in addition to me!
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Running a bit of an experiment looking for folks in Head of Engineering (CTO/VPE/etc) roles who'd be willing to occasionally review drafts or answer brief surveys on head of engineering topics!
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Ok, so expensing versus capitalization of eng efforts within GAAP accounting. I find that many finance teams are willing to accept expensing full eng costs, but other finance teams view that as impossible -- why so much inconsistency across finance teams? What's "correct" in '22?
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At my first tech job, a sr colleague argued that if I ever learned PHP, managers would never let me program in C++ again. Since then, I've thought a lot about the weird lessons people learn in their work, and choosing which lessons I'm willing to learn.
lethain.com/lessons-not-wo
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Did Amazon subtly change its URL format for items? Running into a surprising number of recent breakages when googling for books, clicking on first item, then getting 404s.
(At first thought I'd cookie'd into a non-US Amazon subsite or something, but see no evidence of that.)
I'd add to this list:
- Golf is Not a Game of Perfect by Dr. Bob Rotella cc:
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
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Pulled together the "work related" books I read over the past four years. With 
next to the ones I still think about somewhat frequently!
lethain.com/books-2022/
next to the ones I still think about somewhat frequently!
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Alright, and after finishing my book list yesterday, I've now been able to pull together my 2022 year in review. Very curious to read other folks' year in review posts. Please send them my way!
Full year in review at lethain.com/2022-in-review/
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My biggest question to myself is whether I should try harder to read more memorable books 😅 (I'm leaning towards "no", there are lots of reasons to read books, only one of which is that they might be memorable)
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Pulled together the "work related" books I read over the past four years. With ⭐ next to the ones I still think about somewhat frequently!
lethain.com/books-2022/
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I'm obsessed with 1-person companies and have spent over 50 hours researching them.
Here are the 10 most impressive ones that have generated millions in revenue with 0 employees:
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Another great year for reading and learning. Back when I was a manager I bought books each yr for team’s senior managers to inspire/expand. Here’s a list of books I might have purchased for holiday 2023. I might not agree but definitely learned and made me think. Happy 🕎 🎄❄️ 1/
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Some more writing on managing energy, in this case managing teams' energy, and how sometimes managing energy means moving faster by taking an indirect route.
lethain.com/company-team-s
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Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve done some tweeting here.
I want to candidly talk about what I’ve been up to during the last few wks as a fund mgr.
A thread >>
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Final note: Insights are made from the stuff in each individual's psyche, skip what doesn't make sense.
The entire note is here
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When you really want to pay property taxes but the asset gateway is down.
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Interesting!
(I’ve never found Twitter searches to find my own tweets , which I’ve always wondered about — which is why I put all my tweets into a Slack channel, and others in a database, so I can find tweets more reliably.
The blog post makes me think this has been fixed)
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Their Search Infra team put out a good blog post last month explaining the architecture. As expected of their scale, it’s got a few extra pieces that are specialized 😀
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Twitter’s search indexes are definitely lagging, although in the sort of ambiguous, partial failure sort of way that you’d expect from a distributed system. (Or caching of search results isn’t getting expired consistently, etc.)
Curious to see if this gets fixed!
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My latest is with
We talked about media's slow embrace of tech, fighting the big enterprise bundlers, downturn, early days at Stripe, hiring senior leaders, working with lawyers, biz model vibe shift, pitfalls in lending, limiting beliefs & more
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Good question, Will! On audiobooks where I'm paid upfront (/no royalties), there's almost certainly review benefits like boosting my overall narrator profile (and making ACX/Audible take me more seriously). It's all intangible, but I believe your instincts in this are sound.
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One of the best books that gives a great overview on how much Staff roles can vary is Staff Engineer by , which is a collection of several Staff+ engineer stories/experiences:
staffeng.com/book
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