tl;dr:Will discusses pros and cons of each. His "default advice" on the topic of increasing quality of organizational hiring is: (1) Introduce structured approval when you introduce your second hiring manager in a function. (2) Wait until organization trust grows sufficiently weak that there’s significant skepticism about hiring quality across teams, then introduce a hiring committee. (3) Avoid introducing bar raising unless you have a clear thesis on why the other approaches won’t work out.
tl;dr:Will recalls one the best architecture interviews he's been in, "where the candidate was able to significantly narrow down the possible solutions by asking for a few details: queries per second, expected number of rows, and necessary columns." Will demonstrates how he would approach this question.
tl;dr:"My general advice to folks would be to stay where you are as long as you’re reasonably happy day to day and feel like you’re learning at a good rate. Even if your effective compensation has declined a bit, it’s very hard to determine if the compensation at any other company will hold up either. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re unhappy for non-compensation reasons, then of course you should find another role." Will provides advice to both managers and ICs on navigating career decisions in the current climate.
tl;dr:Will offers the STAR template as a framework to respond to interview questions e.g. "Tell me about a time when you had to change your organizational structure to solve an important problem?” STAR: (1) Situation surrounding your task. (2) Task you undertook, or were assigned, to address the situation. (3) Actions to accomplish the task. (4) Results of your actions.
tl;dr:"Executives are evaluated based on their perceived outcomes rather than actual outcomes." Will discusses this common issue and how it’s hard to force a poorly run company to become better run, but easy to make local improvements on your team. It’s a bit harder to allow those local improvements to spread organically.
tl;dr:Brie provides 10 personal templates for "more efficient progress towards your goals and make the experience of getting there more satisfying." Examples include Ongoing Stack Rank (OSR), “It’s Only The Weekend When” Post-It, “What I’m Proud Of” Scrapbook.
tl;dr:"I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce." When this issue is escalated, "the manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue." Will discusses his approach to resolve the issue.
tl;dr:Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form your infrastructure organization: a small team of 4-8 engineers. Later on, you'll have 70 engineers across 8-10 teams. Those are both stable organizational configurations. The transition between the small to the large team can be difficult and unstable, and Will provides us with a playbook on how to execute it.
tl;dr:Will believes being too attached to any given mental model is what distinguishes managers perceived to have good judgment from those perceived to have bad judgment. "Run a problem through one mental model, and then another. If both models agree on the problem or approach, then great. However, if they disagree, spend time digging into why. There’s something valuable to learn there." He shows us how he's approaching headcount planning this way.
tl;dr:As a leader, you must trust your team. However, trusting your team can, a times, be at odds with helping them succeed. Human error or bad processes can come into play. Will uses "inspected trust:" when someone "brings a problem or a concern to you, trust them that there is a problem, but give yourself space to independently verify their interpretation of the problem." He highlights various ways of doing this.