Will Larson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wow. So interesting. Maybe just as a final thought there, if a PM is having challenges with their EM, what do you think PMs maybe don't realize their engineering managers are finding important or maybe are stressed about that they're just like, "Oh wow, I never thought about that." I think one of the biggest challenges I've historically seen, particularly in the last decade is this idea that engineering managers have the job of giving their team interesting work. I think that that can put... You often see this in growth teams where the growth team is like, "Hey, we just need to do a ton of experiments." An engineer is like, "I want to build something brand new." And the eng managers in between those try to figure out, "Need to ship 50 experiments that are pretty boring and they want to do something brand new. I don't know how to do solve this. " So it's a tricky moment. And good EMs find the way to balance, but that's the biggest source of ongoing friction where the EMs have been told by their teams they need to do something that the PMs just have no visibility into. And it makes the EM seem totally unreliable partners because they're trying to solve these little bit of these invisible constraints. And that's where I think pushing further to understand, "Hey, you keep prioritizing this rewrite into a new programming language." To me that seems like completely idiotic thing to be doing. What's going on? And then once you understand, you might not agree with them, but at least you can have an honest conversation about how to navigate those constraints versus just like, "Man, you won't believe what my EM partner did today. This bozo did blah, blah, blah." And having this victim villain mindset about your peers. An adjacent topic that I wanted to spend some time on is measuring engineering velocity productivity. I think it's probably one of the most common and also maybe the most annoying questions eng leaders get is just how do I know if my engineers are moving as quickly as they can? How do we help them move faster? What advice do you give to eng leaders for eng teams just for how to measure productivity well?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.