The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg)

**Will Larson** (0:00)
I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children, instead of giving them the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults.
And so I go, the engineers won't want to do that work. Well, that's actually not good for the engineers to be sheltered from what is important. And so I actually, one of the highlights is that I think we're coming back this moment where we can actually treat engineers like our peers and put them into really senior leadership roles, and not have this kind of baseline assumption of the go, we have to coddle them or hide them from the real problems. And this is how they're going to get the opportunity to grow as well.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
Today, my guest is Will Larson, one of the most requested guests I've had on this podcast. Will is currently CTO at Carta. He's been a software engineering leader at Stripe, Uber and Com. He's the author of two essential books for all engineers, An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer. And he's releasing his newest book, The Engineering Executive's Primer, in February of next year. He also publishes regularly on his blog at lethane.com, which is a must-read for every engineer and eng leader. In our conversation, Will shares advice on developing your engineering strategy and strategy in general, how to improve the relationship between an eng manager and a PM, how he finds time to write while also working an intense full-time job, how he recommends approaching measuring engineering productivity, how to develop your company values, an amazing story about his time at Digg, and so much more. Will is such a gem of a human and leader, and I'm excited to bring you this episode. With that, I bring you Will Larson after a short word from our sponsor.
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**Will Larson** (3:39)
Thank you so much. Super, super excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:42)
So many people have suggested that I bring you on this podcast. You have a lot of fans out there.
And I am excited to be digging into engineering topics, which we don't do enough of on this podcast. So thank you for making time for this.

**Will Larson** (3:55)
I hope to be a good early engineering guest before we pivot entirely to engineering at some point in the future.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:03)
Wow, I love that. How cool would that be? I was an engineer actually when I started my career. How interesting would that be if we come full circle?
Anyway, I thought it'd be fun to start with just what is changing in engineering. It feels like there's been a lot that has changed over the past few years, especially from kind of the ZERP, zero interest rate era to today's market, which is very different.