danwebb.net

I've been reading a load of articles about the rise of the player-coach and, unless you're running a ten person startup, they're wrong.

As an advisor, this is familiar story: CEOs and CTOs are confused about why their engineering team has got slower as they've added engineers.

Alright, everyone - I'm normally a hype train avoider and as such have avoided a) talking about AI and b) breathy enthusiasm on this blog.

I first became an engineering manager while at Twitter.

Most managers and tech leads consider an important part of their role is being the "shit umbrella" — standing in the storm, catching all the crap from the wider org so your team can “just focus.”

The other day I found myself confronted with that image of Elon Musk walking into Twitter HQ carrying a sink, with the caption "let that sink in."

If you’ve even been glancing at the startup/tech community you will not have missed Paul Graham's recent essay, Founder Mode, and the enormous amounts of surrounding commentary.

While digging around in my notes app I found this old essay from my time at Meta Reality Labs that was originally posted internally.

One thing that isn't spoken about enough is that being an engineer at a startup is it's own unique discipline - it's almost completely unrelated to the kind of role you'd have in a company like Google or Meta.

So, you’ve just got a new job as an engineering leader.