Will Hastings

Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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Yesterday someone said to me that the true Engineering Managers job description is: To enable really smart people to make them look good. I think in truth there is a bit more to it than that phrase. I like that they have included the word 'enable' and that they are highlighting really smart people. If I had to try and rewrite this in the same vain perhaps: To empower and enable really smart people to achieve business outcomes and deliver business value. How you empower and enable those is the art of Engineering Management.

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I rarely post on LinkedIn, but I'm curious to find some folks to chat with about some ideas for an Enterprise Product Management product. My thesis is that the current suite of tools do not do a sufficient job providing features for managing sprawling, complex suites of products + product lines that mature tech organizations maintain. Most PM products are geared toward startups and smaller companies with simpler products, but few tools help PMs and other leaders manage the sprawling complexity of a situation like 30 products over 6 product lines, 14 industry solutions, and components from a dozen acquisitions. Let me know if you'd be down to chat for 20 minutes one day about it!

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My team has been hard at work building the next generation developer experience at Stripe—so proud of them for unveiling a step change for people building on Stripe. Today, we're introducing three big new features: 1) Sandboxes: the next-generation of Stripe test mode. You can *finally* create multiple, isolated environments—handy for building a new feature, or just playing around with something new safely. 2) Workbench: our reimagined developer space, available everywhere in the Stripe dashboard. Inspect anything on the dashboard and get under the hood with the raw JSON in just one click. 3) Event Destinations: our webhook tools are evolving to make it easier to get just the events you need, and now delivering to cloud destinations for the first time. Check out the next generation of Stripe—and get early access—here: https://beta.stripe.dev

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I’ve been doing a ton of interviewing lately, and I’ve come to remember how much I appreciate it as a time to meet colleagues that I genuinely want to work with in some capacity: even if I don’t recommend we hire them. While this industry is huge, the professional circles we end up running in per domain are small worlds. Everyone I meet is a chance to make professional connections with people that turns into a chance to work together in the future—be it collaboration on a paper, peer-reviews of each others’ work, a customer using my products, or a coworker on my team. I love hearing about the work people are proud of and what they’ve built. So, I’ve started closing my interviews with “Thank you for taking the time to tell me about your work and passions, I am inspired, and I really hope we get to work together in the future.” I hire for my company, but the interview? It’s more than my job; it’s part of my career and professional network, and I genuinely look forward to making the connection. I’ve rarely met someone that didn’t inspire me, and I’m grateful I get paid to do it. Humans that build things are amazing, and you don’t have to look very hard to see it if you just slow down and see the spectacularly complex and gifted human sitting across the table from you. I hate that we’ve created this environment where people are so anxious coming in the door because we attach so much of our self worth to getting the “hire” nod from the team. It can be so much more than this. There’s an abundance of what we can all learn from each other, and the competitive nature of it does not serve the interests or well-being of builders, or even the long-term interests of the companies to which we belong.

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Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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We've had an EM role open on our team for several months. This is a post about everything we learned from why we haven't filled it yet. I'd love to get your help in filling it! 🤝 The role: - EM for our 0-to-1 team within Postman, with the goal of defining and winning our category for a new kind of API-level monitoring/observability tool. Our team came into Postman through an acquisition and we're now building the Postman version of our product, using the same tech. - Help scale our product and team from alpha into beta. We are a department with six engineers and approved headcount to grow a lot more in the next year. - The role is 60% prioritization/roadmap management, 40% building the team. The current team members are high-ownership, independent, founding engineer types. 🤔 Misconceptions, miscalibrations, and lessons: - Initially, the role was called "Senior Engineering Manager, Observability." Instead of getting the product engineering managers we were looking for, we primarily got interest from platform/infra EMs. We got thousands of inbound applications and spent months zeroing that out. 🙀 - Previously, our recruiters were sourcing a lot of folks with observability backgrounds. We've learned that since we're actually building a new kind of observability product, much more focused on UX, the profile we're looking for is product-focused rather than tech-focused. No observability experience required. - When people think Postman, they often think of our core product: the API client. So we were getting more interest from folks looking to scale a product, rather than 0-to-1 "I want to build a team and product" types. Postman actually has several other products, for instance testing and Flows, our no-code tool. There is a lot of interesting 0-to-1 work on our way to growing as a multi-product platform! - Some people have the perception that Postman isn't one of the high-growth companies because they're not seeing lots of their friends joining Postman. Postman has quadrupled since 2020, BUT a lot of the engineering growth has been in India. (Postman is the biggest SaaS company to come out of India!) Our team is part of a recent change to grow our US engineering presence. Many of us leaders across the company are looking for folks to join early cohorts of US-based product engineering and platform teams. 💡 What we've changed on our end: - We've deemphasized the "observability" part of the job and emphasized the "new product" and "product engineering" parts of the job. - We've also switched our own reachouts to look for people with product engineering experience at SaaS companies with product-led growth. 👩‍🚀 Help us find our EM! We now have a solid pipeline, but haven't yet made a hire. We'd love to hear from you if: - You have thoughts about how to improve our EM search. - You know someone we should meet. - You're a scrappy EM looking for an opportunity to build a new product while growing a team. Look forward to hearing from you!

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Accessible, Inclusive, Safe, Secure, Sustainable, Reliable, Resilient, Transparent, Independent, Human-centred. "We need a web by and for humans". humanewebmanifesto.com What an important and necessary project by Michelle Barker. Read & share!

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I keep hearing about people getting PIP’d instead of laid off. In other words, gaslighting a decently performing employee into thinking they aren’t meeting the bar. If this ever happened to me it would utterly destroy my confidence. I’m generally a high performer but that is very motivated by my intense imposter syndrome. That means I work really really hard to avoid getting bad feedback. So a bunch of arbitrary and unfair nitpicks leading to a PIP would be really tough for me. I have no problem managing out a team member who is actually not performing, but destroying someone’s confidence to save a few dollars on severance is a low I will not stoop to. As managers we have a responsibility to our team members to treat them with dignity and respect, and above all not traumatize them. For me, this absolutely trumps a paycheck. If you are a manager, you need to refuse to do this. It might be “bad” for your career, but is that more important than treating people with dignity and respect? If it is, you shouldn’t be a manager anyway. If you are a company who does this, you don’t deserve good talent.

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Two articles about CMPs and their impact on performance. One excellent breakdown by Cliff Crocker shared by Tammy Everts! And one mentioning the collaboration of Google and CMPs to help reduce their impact on INP by Search Engine Journal: https://lnkd.in/dcQr9b6s. Some of the work I've done with our teams at Volvo Cars has shown simillar findings. But for our specific case it related the critical rendering path and how loading synchronously CMPs can delay critical resources discovery and loading. Even when those tags are injected at the <body>. Also the 'opted-in' experience is now on my radar to help establish these scenarios onto our performance governance and ensure that tags are properly managed.

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Take mental health days. Assuming your company allows it, take them. At Yelp we changed sick days to wellness days to include all types of wellness. As a leader, even if you don't have the title of manager (senior/staff engineer, tech lead, architect, etc), you can set a healthy tone for your team by leading by example. It's one thing to tell my team to use their wellness when they need it, but way more powerful if I use it. I want my team to take that time. I would rather they don't work, take care of themselves, and come back when they can be present. Will people abuse the policy? Maybe. My team has to trust me with their careers, I trust them with a hell of a lot more than following expectations of a simple wellness policy. I'll choose trust here every time.

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As I've been mentoring PMs (and other functions) in my network recently, I'm hearing from a lot of people who are having a career crisis - folks have just hit a wall and aren't just looking for a new job, but a new approach to work These conversations got me thinking about why people hit these ceilings and what can be done proactively to find and nurture future opportunities before you desperately need to exercise them I've started enumerating all the things I hear, but would love to crowdsource - what am I missing in terms of reasons why careers plateau / fall into a rut: 1/ job takes up 110% of mental bandwidth, no time for anything else 2/ network is homogeneous, everyone I know is doing the same hustle 3/ job mates are clones of me, so not learning from peer group 4/ job emphasizes functional expertise, no room for x-functional learning 5/ learning beyond core role not encouraged (because time, budget, etc) 6/ have a diverse network but not sure who's an expert in what domain 7/ have network and resources, but can't structure a learning / growth plan 8/ learned a lot, but don't know how to showcase it / tell my story broadly

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I've been thinking about the challenge of preserving the "low priority voice" as software products scale. As teams and projects grow, folks outside of development and product positions seem to get more and more quiet—or maybe they're just harder to hear. Sure, a typo here, some inconsistent spelling there; these don't really rise to the level of "bugs" since nothing's technically broken. But when these little things accumulate, they can start to chip away at the users' trust in the product and the company. Curious to know, how are others tackling this within their teams? #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamCollaboration #QualityAssurance

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I've never understood companies that limit themselves to hiring only folks who've already worked on their stack. Sure, if you can hire somebody who's a real expert in part of your stack, then you should; but otherwise, any good developer is going to learn the language/framework faster than they'll learn how your code actually works. Understanding your unique problems and how you've uniquely addressed them inside your application's code takes many months longer than learning a language or framework, and there's no better way to learn that language or framework than by working on actual production code written in it.

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🌟 Attention Engineering Managers and Technical Leaders! 🌟 In just two weeks, on June 28th at 10 AM PDT, I’m excited to host an interactive roundtable on Feature Flags and Delivery in conjunction with ELC! 🚀 Why Attend? This is a collaborative discussion where your expertise and curiosity are key! Whether you're experienced or eager to learn, your contributions are invaluable. 🔍 Discussion Points: - Decoupling Processes - Boosting Team Efficiency - Optimizing Feature Delivery - Tracking Platform Usage Expect rich conversations on best practices, unique implementations, methodologies, and the latest tools enhancing feature flagging and delivery. Who Should Join? - Engineering Managers - Technical Leads - DevOps Engineers - Software Developers This roundtable is your chance to: - Share your experiences - Gain new insights - Network with peers - Discover practical recommendations RSVP Now and mark your calendars for June 28th at 10 AM PDT! Let’s collaborate and elevate our skills together! #EngineeringManagement #TechLeaders #FeatureFlags #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamEfficiency #TechRoundtable

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The People You Are Losing with RTO Are Exactly the People You Need Many companies are pushing hard on the "return to office" (RTO) strategy these days, sparking a lot of back-channel and small-group discussions in my network. After seeing the resulting mobility, I have some thoughts to share. First, let’s identify who I'm talking about: my network consists mainly of experienced developers who are polymaths and autodidacts. These individuals constantly explore new technologies, self-taught across multiple domains, and create projects in their spare time. Simply put, they are exactly the people a firm should want to retain as AI reshuffles everything. The main question being asked is "why?" During the large shift to remote work during COVID, most tech firms that implemented smart remote work strategies saw no drop, or even an increase, in productivity. So why push RTO now? The conclusions seem to be: (a) a desire to regain control and micromanage, (b) artificially increasing the value of leased office space through forced occupancy, and (c) using it as a stealth layoff mechanism with a built-in loyalty test. This does not apply to projects with obvious, technology-driven requirements like air-gapped networks, specialized and limited hardware needs, etc. The next big question is, "What do we do about it?" The overwhelming response is, "Leave the company." It might not happen immediately, but once an RTO demand is made, the type of developer I'm discussing decides to find another job or contract. Economic necessity might keep them on staff while they look, but their decision is made. It's important to note that not all of these developers will immediately leave upon the RTO demand. The current economic climate and job market, flooded with talent due to RTO-driven changes, create a highly competitive environment. It might seem like firms have the upper hand on retention, and to some extent, they do—but only temporarily. The reality is that you will eventually lose that developer. Fast-moving companies see the opportunities created even during this economic downturn. They have noticed that offering fully remote work at a good salary is an effective way to attract the talent they need to navigate a highly dynamic technical landscape. It might take time for the market to absorb all the newly available talent, but it will find a use for them before long. My message to companies is that the people you are losing with RTO are exactly the ones you need to effectively navigate this moment of unprecedented technological change. Your loss will be your competitor's gain.

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