tl;dr:“Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help – often health or mental health services – to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function.” Will discusses how engineering orgs can implement similar policies.
tl;dr:“A complete engineering strategy has five components: explore, diagnose, refine, policy, and operation. However, it’s actually quite challenging to read a strategy document written that way. That’s an effective sequence for creating a strategy, but it’s a challenging sequence for those trying to quickly read and apply a strategy without necessarily wanting to understand the complete thinking behind each decision.” Will covers: (1) Why the order for writing strategy is hard to reading strategy. (2) How to organize a strategy document for reading. (3) How to refactor and merge components for improved readability. (4) Additional tips for effective strategy documents.
tl;dr:“That context makes LLM adoption a great topic for a strategy case study. This document is an engineering strategy document determining how a hypothetical company, Theoretical Ride Sharing, could adopt LLMs.”
tl;dr:"I’d like to recommend 6 core meetings that I recommend every organization start with, and that I’ve found can go a surprisingly long way. These six are split across three operational meetings, two developmental meetings and finally a monthly engineering Q&A to learn what the organization is really thinking about." Will discusses each in depth.
tl;dr:"I’d like to recommend 6 core meetings that I recommend every organization start with, and that I’ve found can go a surprisingly long way. These six are split across three operational meetings, two developmental meetings and finally a monthly engineering Q&A to learn what the organization is really thinking about." Will discusses each in depth.
tl;dr:“I’ve been working fairly directly on meaningful applicability of LLMs to existing products for the last year, and wanted to type up some semi-disorganized notes. These notes are in no particular order, with an intended audience of industry folks building products.” Will discusses opportunities re-configuration, combining LLMs with unsophisticated algorithms to retrieve data. And more.
tl;dr:“It remains the most common category of reasoning error that I see stressed executives make. If you’re not sure how to make progress, then emotionally it feels a lot better to substitute motion for lack of progress, but in practice you’re worse off.” Will highlights this with examples.
tl;dr:Will discusses the scenarios when taking risks make the most sense as a leader. “Taking direct, personal risk is a prerequisite to taking ownership of interesting problems that matter to your company. A risk-free existence isn’t a leadership role, regardless of whatever your title might be. Indeed, an uncomfortable belief of mine is that leadership is predicated on risk. The upside is that almost all meaningful personal and career growth is hidden behind the risk-taking door. There’s a lot of interesting lessons to learn out there, and while you can learn a lot from others, some of them you have to learn yourself.”
tl;dr:Tradeoff decisions often result in disappointment e.g. you can’t deploy software quickly and test it thoroughly, you have to sacrifice usability due to safety features. Will believes the key is to introduce a new dimension to the decision making process. His approach: (1) Believe and socialize that there is a new dimension to discover. (2) Get specific on stakeholder requirements. (3) Seeing dimensions is the same as seeing layers of context. Expand your contextual awareness or pull in a team with knowledge. (4) Test new dimensions for usefulness quickly. Don’t go too deep. (5) Ask those who’ve solved similar tradeoffs. (6) Only add a dimension if it provides significantly better outcomes.
tl;dr:Will hypothesizes, if we had five free hours each week, how would he spend them? He sees four valid options to build his career, as follows: (1) Write code or engage in detailed work within the engineering org. (2) Build broader context: expand your context outside the engineering org. Understand your peers work, goals and obstacles e.g. talk with customers. (3) Improve current systems: Work on your strategy or planning process. (4) Build relationships: Expand your internal or industry networks.