Executives certainly make staffing decisions about Platform and Infrastructure teams, but I think they do something even more important: define the company’s engineering strategy. Many companies take a permissive stance towards adopting a variety of technologies, which creates a diffuse approach to internal teams who are supporting too broad a technology landscape. At both Carta and Calm, my most valuable contribution to developer productivity has been constraining allowed technologies, which allows us to concentrate our investment–however large it happens to be–as densely as possible.
Will Larson, CTO at Carta and author of the upcoming book The Engineering Executive’s Primer
This month I learned
Ikigai (生き甲斐, lit. ‘a reason for being’) is a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living.