At Stripe, guest Will Larson received his first official management training by an employer. It taught him about different management styles, problem solving, and more. But most employees don’t get management training, which can cause problems down the road. Marcus and Will discuss this, plus what it takes to handle leadership roles.

Show Notes

• Most coders don’t aspire to be managers
• “there's that idea that really if you think about the consequences and the kind of statefulness of these human systems that you're working with, you can come to understand them in a way that you can't if you look at them as causal”
• “this is where systems thinking is so powerful, which is if you look at it causally you've solved a problem, if you look at it from a systems perspective you've created a problem, and you really have to have the slightly longer term view and just to recognize that you are burying yourself when you take many of the quick easy ways out”
• “the joy of senior manager is these problems are really hard to solve but you actually can finesse most problems into like a problem statement where everyone like is happy”
• “So I've been thinking about the idea of forced change a lot recently.”
• “A lot of incident programs have the same problem where they learn about the gaps but then you have to find the space to improve upon them”
• We’re still learning: Most Silicon Valley companies are still very young
• “There's still a ton of scarcity for kind of the folks at the top of the market.”

Links:

• O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference – Berlin, Germany. November 4-7, 2019. Use discount code MB20 to save 20% on Bronze, Silver, and Gold packages.
• Will Larson on Twitter
• Will’s book, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management