Will Larson：工程管理规则如何在 AI 时代改变

简要描述Brief Description

Will Larson 探讨了零利率时代之后工程管理发生的变化、人工智能如何重塑技术领导力，以及工程师和管理者可以采取哪些措施来打造经久不衰的团队并调整职业发展方向。对话还涉及他在 Yahoo、Digg、Uber、Stripe、Calm、Carta 和 Imprint 的经历，以及他的写作方式。Will Larson discusses how engineering management changed after the zero-interest-rate era, how AI reshapes technical leadership, and what engineers and managers can do to build durable teams and adapt their careers. The conversation also covers his experiences at Yahoo, Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm, Carta, and Imprint, as well as his approach to writing.

目录Table of Contents

• 简介
  Intro
• 来自 Yahoo! 的故事
  Stories from Yahoo!
• Digg v4 重写：内部故事
  Digg’s v4 rewrite: the insider story
• Will迈向工程领导岗位之路
  Will’s path to eng leadership
• Uber, Stripe, Carta, and Calm
• 首席技术官（CTO）负责什么工作？
  What does a CTO do?
• Will 在 Imprint 的角色
  Will’s role at Imprint
• 工程管理的发展历程
  How engineering management has evolved
• ZIRP 对科技行业的影响
  ZIRP’s impact on tech
• 职业发展阶梯
  Career ladders
• 英语 1 与英语 2
  Eng 1 vs Eng 2
• 软件工程岗位正在发生怎样的变化
  How software engineering roles are changing
• 修订后的工程领导力准则
  Revised rules of engineering leadership
• 成为工程经理后陷入官僚主义的风险
  The risks of becoming a bureaucrat as an EM
• 如何成为一名首席技术官？
  How to become a CTO?
• 中层管理与一线管理的区别
  Middle management vs. line management
• 威尔的写作
  Will’s writing
• 图书推荐
  Book recommendations

简介Intro

在2010年代，担任工程经理最糟糕的事情之一就是：当你跻身工程管理层时，最先学到的教训之一便是——嘿，你以后绝不能再做技术决策了。One of the worst parts of being a engineering manager in the 2010s is when you joined the ranks of engineering management, one of the first lessons you'd get is like, hey, you need to never make a technical decision again.

主持人：我记得别人当时真的就是这么告诉我的。而如今的理念显然完全不是这样。我当时特别反感的一个想法是：Staff 工程师主要就是做一些有意思、好玩、能让自己获得成就感的问题。我最优秀的几位工程师中，有些人会说：“我想做更有意思的问题。”而那一刻，我只能说：“我能给你的只有苦差事，但正是这些苦差事能让业务取得成功。”Host: I remember that's literally what I was told. And that's definitely not the ethos today. One of the ideas that I was really frustrated with at the time was this idea that staff engineers principally got to work on interesting, fun problems that they found personally rewarding. Some of my very best engineers were like, I want the more interesting problem. moment is like I only have suffering to offer but this suffering is what's going to make the business succeed.

Will Larson：大家都在想，我是不是有点像个“职业陷阱”。Will Larson: People are wondering am I a bit of a career trap.

主持人：现在中层管理确实不好做，对吧？我个人觉得，重新深入到软件编写的细节中，收获颇丰。这算是一个独特的重新提升技能的机会。我确实认为，如果你从事管理工作，现在要么就得重新深入细节，要么……过去几年，工程管理发生了哪些变化？Will Larson 是最适合谈论这个话题的人之一。过去 10 年里，他在四家不同的公司担任过工程高管。Host: It's a hard time in middle management right what I found personally very rewarding is kind of getting back into the details of writing software this is kind of like a unique moment to actually reskill. I do think if you're in management I think right now either you have to like get back into the details or how has injury management changed in the last few years. Will Larson is one of the best people to talk about this. He's been an engineering executive for the last 10 years at four different companies.

他写过一些关于工程领导力和盈余水平的广为人知的书。我很欣赏他思考之深入、周到。今天我们将探讨零利率如何深刻影响了2010年代十年间的管理习惯。其中许多习惯如今已不再有用。Wrote some of the most widely books on engineering leadership and surplus levels. And I really appreciate how deep and thoughtful of a thinker he is. Today we cover how zero interest rates heavily influenced a decade of management habits in the 2010s. Many of these habits no longer helpful.

工程师的角色正在发生怎样的变化？为什么解决业务真正关心的问题，对于在公司中脱颖而出变得越来越重要？如今如何才能成为 CTO？为什么一线经理往往比中层管理者更适合担任工程高管？还有更多话题。如果你是一名工程师或工程经理，正在思考随着 AI 改变行业，你的职业道路可能会是什么样，以及如今成为 CTO 的路径是什么，那么这期节目就是为你准备的。How the role of engineers is changing and why solving problems that the business cares about is becoming much more important to thrive inside of companies. the path to becoming a CTO today and why line managers often make better engineering executives than middle managers do and many more. If you're an engineer or engineering manager and are wondering what your career path could look like with AI changing the industry and how the path to CTO looks like today, this episode is for you.

主持人：Will，欢迎来到播客节目。 嘉宾：谢谢邀请我。很高兴来到这里。终于能当面聊聊了。Host: Will welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Finally chat in person.

主持人：我们认识这么久了，终于在线下见面了。我们俩都开始写作了，接下来也会聊聊写作。之前我们也只是随便聚聚，不过这次这样挺好的。我想从一开始聊起。你是怎么对电脑产生兴趣的？你一开始就对电脑感兴趣吗？Host: Finally in person because we know each other for so long. Both started writing. We will talk about that writing as well and also just hung out before but this is nice. I want to jump into the beginning. How did you get interested in computers? Were you interested in computers to start with

Will Larson：从我五岁的时候起？我们家有台 Mac 2C 之类的。它不是黑白的，也不是最早期的那种，不过相当基础。我想它上面有一样东西，是我四岁半或五岁时就知道怎么用的，就是 Kid Pix。你可能……我不知道，你用过 Kid Pix 吗？我没用过。我知道有这么个东西，但从来没用过。Will Larson: from the time I was five? We had like a Mac 2C or something like that. This was like a not not black and white, not the very earliest one, but it was pretty basic and I think it had like one thing that I understood how to use as a four and a half or 5year-old which is like kid pics which you maybe I don't did you ever use see kids pics? I didn't I know of it, but I never used it.

Will Larson：那不是什么特别复杂的东西。我甚至不确定能不能保存文件，但它基本上就是一个面向儿童的图形程序，你可以画方块、圆形之类的小图形。不过，那算是我接触计算机的开端。我记得自己经常用那台电脑。那时候基本上还谈不上有什么互联网，也几乎没有办法知道该怎么做任何事，除了对着电脑一通敲敲打打——从某种意义上说，这也是编写软件最根本的方式：不停地折腾，直到弄明白怎么让它运行起来。所以我觉得那是个很好的入门，不过说实话，除了玩多用户地下城之类的游戏，我没怎么做过软件相关的事。Will Larson: It wasn't like a super sophisticated thing. I don't even know if you could save files, but it was basically like a graphical program for children and you could make squares and circles and little like graphics. But that was kind of the introduction to me and I remember using that computer a lot and like that this is an era when there really no internet to speak of, really no way to figure out how to do anything other than just banging on it, which is sort of the fundamental of writing software in some ways is just banging until you figure out how to make it work. So, I think that was a great introduction, but to be honest, I wasn't doing a whole lot in like software other than, you know, multi-user dungeons.

你小时候玩过 MUD 吗？Did you ever like play a MUD growing up?

主持人：多用户地牢。什么是“不”？什么是模组？Host: Multi-user dungeon. What's a no? What's a mod?

Will Larson：这是一款文字游戏。基本上，魔兽世界其实是一款图形化的文字游戏，我们基本上是从 MUD，也就是多用户地下城的概念中发展出这个想法的。不过我高中时才开始更多地接触软件。最初接触了一点 IRC，也就是互联网中继聊天，还有 mIRC——说实话，我甚至不知道 M 代表什么。作为 IRC 客户端，它可以做一点脚本编写，比如用正则表达式；但很多 MUD 客户端能做的事情更多，小时候我可以在里面设置一大堆触发器和正则表达式。我就是从那时开始进一步接触这些东西，也在那里学会了正则表达式。不过，直到上大学，我才真正开始写软件。Will Larson: It's a textbased game. And so, basically, the idea is that World of Warcraft is actually a graphical textbased game that we basically derive from these ideas of MUDs or multi-user dungeons. But when I was a kid in high school, that's when I started doing more software. So a little bit you start with IRK IRC internet relay chat and Merc which I don't even know what the M stood for to be totally honest as a client could do a little bit of scripting with reaxes but then a lot of the MUD clients as as a kid could do a ton of triggers reaxes and that's where I got a little bit further into it learned my reaxes there but really I didn't start writing software at all until I got to college

主持人：那你上大学以后开始写什么了？你是怎么进入更严肃的创作阶段的？ 我上大学时其实还不知道自己想学什么。我想过学物理、英语，或者经济学什么的。我父亲是经济学教授，所以家里多少有些传承，我也觉得自己应该努力达到他的成就。不过最后，我算是误打误撞地在学校选了计算机科学。那是肯塔基州一所规模不大的私立学校。Host: and then at college what did you start writing? How did you get into a more serious level? So I came into college not really knowing what I wanted to study and I thought I might do physics or English or you know economics. My father was professor of economics so there's some some family you know lineage to try to live up to but ultimately I kind of fell into computer science at my school which was a small kind of private school in Kentucky.

我毕业那年，计算机科学专业里大概有 13 个人。嗯，那基本就是整个专业的人数。我想我那年有四个人毕业，然后大三和大二的学生加起来大概有 13 个，所以规模相当小。我想我那年有四个人毕业，不过对，我真正开始接触计算机科学就是在那时候。There were I think 13 people in the computer science program the year that I graduated. So and that was like the entire program. So I think there were four graduates my year and then like the juniors and sophomores in total were like 13 and so it was quite small. So I think there were four that graduated my year but but yeah but really that was when I got into it.

我之所以喜欢，是因为我们有一门必修的入门课程。有意思的是，很多美国大学，尤其是规模较小的私立大学，都会有一些五花八门的必修要求。所以我必须修一门基督教入门课程，内容是基督教史；另外还得修一门计算机科学入门课，或者其他什么课程。我忘了另一个选项是什么了。总之，我很喜欢计算机科学那门课。And why I just enjoyed we had an intro course that we required to take and it's kind of funny with a lot of American colleges especially smaller private ones they have random kind of requirements. So I was required to take a introduction to Christianity course like the history of Christianity then also required to take like a introduction to computer science or some other course. I forget what the other alternative was. So I really enjoyed the computer science one.

主持人：你当时是否已经认定，自己很可能会成为一名职业软件开发人员、工程师、程序员——不管那时候我们怎么称呼这个职业？Host: Did you decide that you're probably going to be a professional software developer, engineer, programmer, whatever we call it back then.

Will Larson：我觉得，聊职业发展时有件挺有意思的事：很多人都上名校。你跟 Waterlue 的人聊天，对方会说：“哦，你是怎么找到这份工作的？”他们会说，Waterlue 的每个人都会接受辅导，学习如何进入软件行业。他们甚至会互相交流面试题的答案。所以，他们熟悉面试内容，面试前还会反复练习。Will Larson: So I think one of the interesting things when you talk a lot about careers is like a lot of folks go to like elite schools. So you talk to someone from Waterlue and they're like, "Oh, how did you get your job?" They're like, well, literally everyone at Waterlue is coached on how to go do software. They're literally trading the answers to interviews with each other. So, they know the interviews and drill on the interviews before they go in.

他们也很喜欢这个很棒的项目。他们多年来一直在参加合作实习。真的很优秀，都是很棒的候选人。They also like amazing program. They've been doing co-ops for years. Like they're great. They're great candidates.

他们往往表现得非常出色。但如果你去了滑铁卢、MIT 或斯坦福，真的，就像有一条现成的路，你只要踏上去、好好表现，它就会带着你一路走下去。而这些学生都非常优秀。They tend to do really well. But if you go to Waterlue, you go to MIT, you go to Stanford, you really there's like this path and you just kind of put your foot on it and you do well and it carries you there. And these are amazing students.

几乎Almost

Will Larson：但如果他们足够优秀，能留在这个项目里，这就像一部扶梯。他们往往会慢慢走到那个位置。我去的是一所小学校，我那届计算机科学专业毕业的也就四个人左右。确实没有什么发展路径。Will Larson: but it is an escalator if they're good enough to stay in the program. They tend to kind of get there. Going to a small school with again like fourish folks that graduated my year in computer science. There really was no path.

我记得有一个、一个比我们早一年毕业的人在做软件开发。他去了肯塔基州列克星敦的一家赛马博彩软件公司工作，我觉得那儿的工程师可能不超过五个。这人真的很有才华，也很能干。而这大概就是他们当时知道怎么找的工作。I remember one of the one of the folks that graduated the year before that was working in software. He went to go work on a horse racing betting software company in Lexington, Kentucky, which I don't think there were more than like five engineers there. And this was like a really talented, really capable person. And this is kind of what they knew how to find.

所以对我来说，这段经历其实挺有意思的。我当时不太确定自己要做什么。后来我在日本参加了 JET 项目，也就是日本交流与教学项目，教英语。我在日本偏远的 GEU 县待了一年。And so for me, it actually was interesting. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. I actually ended up teaching English in Japan on the chat program, the Japanese exchange teaching program. And so I was in the middle of nowhere in Japan in the GEU Prefecture for a year.

但那时我才真正开始大量写东西。所以我当时就想：“嘿，我肯定不会当英语老师超过一年。这是一份为期一年的合同，我做满了一年。我完全没想过要再做第二年，之后就回来了，开始琢磨如何从那里真正打入硅谷。”But that's when I really started writing a lot. So I was like, "Hey, I'm definitely not going to be an English teacher for more than one year. It's a one-year contract. I did the one year. I had no thoughts about doing a second year and I came back and started trying to figure out how to actually break into Silicon Valley from there.

来自 Yahoo! 的故事Stories from Yahoo!

主持人：而且你当时的目标已经是打入硅谷。为什么是硅谷？能不能带我们回顾一下那时候的硅谷是什么样的？Host: And you had the goal break into Silicon Valley already. Why Silicon Valley? Can you take us back to what Silicon Valley was like back then?

Will Larson：首先，当时我并不知道硅谷是什么，对吧？我只是想找一份薪水不错的工作。我想你知道，我是 2007 年毕业的，接下来一年在教英语，然后大概在 2009 年初开始为雅虎工作。那真是个非常有意思的时期。Will Larson: First, at the time I didn't know what Silicon Valley was, right? I just I just wanted a job that paid well. And I think you know this was so I graduated in ' 07 and then the next year I was teaching English and then I actually started working for Yahoo in I guess maybe early '09 something like that. Really interesting time though.

所以一开始，我是在东海岸远程为雅虎做合同工。那是个挺有意思的时期。我开始和雅虎合作，是因为我围绕一个叫 Yahoo Boss 的产品写了一系列博客文章。这个产品可以让你构建自己的搜索服务，是他们某个团队推出的。So initially I was working for Yahoo from the east coast as a remote contractor. It was an interesting moment. So I started working with Yahoo because I wrote a series of blog posts on something called Yahoo Boss build your own search service. And this was a product that they had launched on this one team.

而且我觉得它在行业里并没有获得太多关注。不过它推出时，我写了很多内容，还做了三四篇关于用 Python 构建机器人之类的东西的教程。And I think it wasn't getting a lot of kind of traction in the industry. But when it launched, I was writing a lot. So I did three or four tutorials on building boss things in Python.

用 Django 做 Yahoo BOSS 相关的东西。我做了一个 Django 项目，名字记不太清了。可能叫 Django Springsteen，是一个用于在 Django 中使用 Yahoo BOSS 的搜索库。所以我想，他们因为有人在写这个而兴奋起来，这也让我兴奋起来。最终，这份工作以合同工的形式敲定。后来他们的政策是，做满一年合同工后就必须转为全职。不过我之所以被聘为合同工，是因为他们那整整一年基本上都冻结了招聘。boss things with Django. Kind of made a Django, forget the name. It might have been Django Springsteen was like the name of the search library to use Yahoo Boss with Django. And so I think they got excited because someone was writing about it, which also got me excited. And that ended up ultimately in this contract job. And then ultimately they had the policy where you had to move after a year as a contractor and go full-time. And the reason I was hired as a contractor though is they had a hiring freeze for basically that entire year

主持人：因为这件事发生在金融危机之后不久。Host: because this was right after a financial crisis.

Will Larson：所以他们只能一轮接一轮地裁员。他们可以聘用几个合同工，却不能招全职员工。到了12个月时，他们就会说：“嘿，你现在必须转成全职员工，否则就不再受雇了，因为我们得避开一些合规义务。”于是他们又说：“嘿，如果你转全职，就得搬家。”所以说白了，要么搬过去，我就能在雅虎工作；要么我就彻底没工作。当时我从东海岸搬到加州还挺轻松的。除了工作之外，我没什么牵挂。Will Larson: And so they're just going through layoff after layoff. And so they could hire a couple contractors, couldn't hire anyone full-time, and then at 12 months they are like, "Hey, now you have to go full-time or you're not employed because there's kind of the compliance obligations to avoid." And so they're like, "Hey, and if you go full-time, you got to move." And so basically, I had a job at Yahoo if I moved or I didn't have a job at all. And so I moved from the East Coast out to California pretty easy at the time. Didn't have a lot of obligations other than, you know, employment.

主持人：是啊。而那时候，我想雅虎的星光在谷歌的映衬下已经有些黯淡了，但他们仍然是一家相当不错的公司，对吧？而且也是很棒的工程挑战。比如，WhatsApp 的创始人就出身于雅虎，这一点广为人知。Host: Yeah. And back then, Yahoo, I guess, their star was kind of fading with Google, but they were still a pretty good company, right? And good engineering challenge. Like WhatsApp founders famously came from Yahoo.

Will Larson：我觉得 Yahoo 确实是一家非常有意思的公司，对吧？我认为 Yahoo 面临的挑战之一是，如果你在 2007、2008 年进入科技行业，那时很多事情都因为开源而变得容易了。不过，Yahoo 是一家早于所有这些开源库出现的公司。那么，2007、2008 年你在 Yahoo 怎么运行服务器呢？你运行 Y Apache。Will Larson: I think Yahoo honestly is a really interesting company, right? And so I think one of the challenges for Yahoo is if you if you came into tech in 2007208 a lot of open source sort of made things easy. Yahoo though is a company that predated all these open source libraries. And so how do you run a server at Yahoo in 2007208 you run Y Apache.

所以他们有自己的 Apache 分支，前面加了个 Y。你会在 Y Apache 上运行什么编程语言？当然是 YPHP，也就是他们分叉出来的 PHP。那么你会用什么 UI 库呢？So they had their own fork of Apache with a Y in front of it. What programming do language do you run on Y Apache? Well, of course you would run YPHP, which was their fork of PHP. And what UI library would you use?

你可能知道这个，它叫 YUI。那要怎么安装东西呢？比如说，在 Unix 上，你会用类似 apt 之类的工具。而你会用 Yinst，它是一个用于处理安装依赖关系的 Perl 脚本。You might know this one, but it's YUI. And then how do you install things? So, if you think about like you know, among you, you'd have kind of like a AP or whatnot. Well, you'd use Y inst which was this Pearl script that would navigate kind of the dependencies for installation.

所以这真的是个特别特别迷人的地方，他们那里的每一样东西都是从零开始做的。他们甚至有一个 Kafka 的前身，我想它叫 Yrepple，基本上就是一种读取日志，用来在数据库之外实现复制的东西。那是管理状态的核心工具。真是个迷人的地方。我想，如果只讲一个我喜欢的雅虎小故事，那就是：David Pho 以审核分配出去的每一台服务器而闻名。所以其中一位创始人会负责审核。理论上，这么做是为了促使大家承担责任，对吧？你得证明自己需要更多服务器。但实际结果却是，这催生了服务器黑市。And so just like really really fascinating place to come up but every single thing there they made from from scratch even they had like a precursor to Kafka which I think was called Yrepple which basically would be like a read log to do replication kind of outside of a database and that was like a core tool for managing state just like a fascinating place and I think if I just had like one quick Yahoo story that I loved so David Pho kind of famously approved every server that was allocated in the And so one of the founders like would review. And so the theory was this would drive accountability, right? You had to prove you needed more servers. What it actually did is it created like the black market of servers.

所以我团队里有那么一位工程师，手里有 30 台服务器，是之前一个被取消的项目留下的，他一直没还回来。And so on my team there was like one engineer that had 30 servers from a prior canceled project he never gave back.

所以他基本上就是把它们卖给你，对吧？那如果你没能获得批准……And so he would basically sell them to you effectively, right? And so if you couldn't get approval

Will Larson：比如靠人情、欠条之类的。所以实际上，这意味着他们有大量过时的服务器，耗电效率也很低，因为人们从来不归还服务器。于是你得找个喜欢你的人，借几台服务器来启动你的项目。真有意思，这些激励机制竟然会导致如此离谱的情况。Will Larson: for like favors and IU and stuff. And so it actually meant they had massive numbers of outdated servers that were like using like inefficient like power wattage because people would never give servers back. And so you had to find like someone who liked you with servers to loan for your projects to launch. Like fascinating how these incentives drive just like wild wild situation.

主持人：嗯，我想这算是你后来成为工程领导者时会记住的一件事。Host: Well, I guess that's one thing you remember for when you later became an engineering leader.

Will Larson：是的，我觉得这非常有启发性，对吧？我也很好奇，David Pho 是否知道人们真的搞出了一个服务器黑市？我猜他可能知道，但这并没有改变那种自上而下的指令。Will Larson: Yeah, I it was in very instructive, right? And I'm sure I'm curious like did David Pho know that people were literally had a black market of servers? Like I assume he probably did know but didn't didn't change the kind of the top down mandate.

Digg v4 重写版：内部揭秘Digg’s v4 rewrite: the insider story

主持人：那么，在雅虎之后，你就去了 Dig 吗？Host: Then after Yahoo, is that when you ended up at Dig?

Will Larson：是的。Will Larson: Yeah.

主持人：当时，这家公司因一个非常有趣的故事而闻名。Host: At the time very famous company for a very amusing story.

Will Larson：你能跟我们讲讲你当时是怎么决定转行的吗？因为那是一家初创公司，对吧？当时 DIG 还是一家初创公司。所以，你问不同的人，可能会听到不同的说法，但我觉得 DIG 的故事大致是这样的：它就像 Reddit 出现之前的版本，是一个大型社区网站，但内容由中心统一策划。Reddit 则有各种子社区，社区成员通过算法——也就是 Reddit 的算法——投票决定他们想看什么。Will Larson: Can you tell us about like how you decided to switch because it was a startup, right? DIG was a startup back then. So depending who you talk to, there were going to be different narratives, but I think the dig narrative is basically it was like the before Reddit, it was the big community site, but it was centrally curated. And so Reddit had these sub communities where the communities kind of voted with the algorithm on what they wanted, the Reddit algorithm.

Digg 的首页内容实际上是由中央团队统一策划的。因此，它的体验非常不同，但这也意味着内容质量比较稳定，偏见和 subreddit 那类问题也少一些。取而代之的是偏见和集中式审核的问题。还有一些社区和 IRC 频道，人们基本上会互相帮忙，设法让内容登上 Digg 首页。Dick was actually centrally curated on what went on to the front page. And so it had like a very different experience, but it also meant that the quality was consistent and you had less of kind of the bias and subreddit problem. Instead, you had a bias and central moderation problem. And there were, you know, communities, there were IRC channels where people would basically trade favors trying to get things onto the dig front page.

事实上，在 Digg，我们更改算法之前，有人说要来杀了我，因为我抢了他们的饭碗——他们整个生计，你懂的，就是靠出售首页展示机会。他们不认可新算法，甚至真的威胁我们的生命。所以，那地方确实很有意思，不过 Digg 曾经是一个非常重要的网站。你知道，我加入雅虎时，情况已经不是这样了，但就在我加入雅虎前不久，雅虎的首页实际上还是一个放在 NetScaler 上的静态文件；NetScaler 基本上就像一台文件服务器，也就是一种存储文件的设备。And in fact for dig before we changed the algorithm and I had people saying they had come murder me for stealing their livelihood because their entire you know livelihood was selling access to the front page. The new algorithm didn't support that and they were literally threatening our lives. And so it was it was a fascinating place but dig is dig was a really important website. And you know, when I joined Yahoo, this wasn't true, but a little bit before I joined Yahoo, literally the front page of Yahoo was a static file on a net a net scaler, which was basically like a filer, which is like a way to store files.

而 Yahoo Sports 当时就像一个静态页面，对吧？那个时代早期的 Digg 也曾是一个非常重要的静态页面。但后来它不再是静态页面，而是变成了某种动态社区。我觉得当时这对很多人来说确实非常重要，不过随着时间推移，它的相关性逐渐减弱。后来它重启过几次，但再也没能像当初那样获得关注。And Yahoo Sports was just like a static page, right? And so dig in that era like early on was like a very important static page. But then it became not a static page like a dynamic of sorts community I think really was extremely important to folks at the time though it's faded into slightly less relevancy over time and it's been restarted a couple of times since but never really picking up the traction once did.

我记得它曾一度跻身网站排名前十。I think it was a top 10 website at one point.

主持人：是的，它曾排进前十，这也是我记得那个故事的原因：他们进行了一次大规模重写。我想可能是 V4 版本，对吧？从外面看，我记得 Digg 当时发展得很好，也很受欢迎。那时大家有些抱怨，可能有点像几年前对 Stack Overflow 的抱怨。然后 Digg 做了一次大规模重写，接着灾难就发生了。这是个特别精彩的故事，大家都在谈论。你能跟我们说说到底发生了什么吗？从内部看起来又是什么样的？毕竟当时你就在开发这个东西。Host: Yeah, it was top 10 and that's why the story that I remember is they did a big rewrite. I think it might have been a V4 one, right? And from the outside what I remember is well well dig was doing good. It was popular. There were complaints a bit like with Stack Overflow maybe a few years ago and then Dig did this massive right and disaster followed and it was like a very juicy story. Everyone was talking about it. What can you tell us like what actually happened and what did it look like from the inside cuz you were building this thing.

威尔·拉森：是的，那次发布时我就在那儿，发布之后我也还在那里。所以我是在那次发布推出前大约3到6个月加入DIG的，那是一段很有意思的时期。我加入后，在我正式开始工作的前一个星期五，CEO被撤换了，然后凯文·罗斯回来担任……Will Larson: Yeah. So I was there for that launch and I was there after that launch and so I joined DIG about 3 to 6 months before that launch went out and it was a fascinating time. So I joined and then the Friday before I started the CEO got removed and then Kevin Rose came back in as

主持人：他是创始人，对吧？Host: he was founder right?

Will Larson：Kevin Rose 是创始 CEO。他在那里待了一段时间，之后某种程度上退居幕后，后来又回来了。不过他回来时，我们面临着一个非常紧迫的截止期限，必须在那之前推出 Digg；这次发布伴随着一次重写。所以，Digg v3.5 是 Digg 4 之前的版本，基本上完全是用 PHP 编写、运行在分布式 MySQL 上的软件。那是一个不同的时代，对吧？Digg 运行在我们自己的硬件上，设备放在托管机房里，所以并不是说想扩容就能直接启动一些资源之类的。但 Digg v4 试图解决一大堆问题。最重要的是，当时互联网正在发生变化。Will Larson: Kevin Rose was the founding CEO. He was there for a while and then he kind of stepped back and then he then he came back in but he came back in and we had this you know very hard deadline to launch dig before which was a rewrite and so dig v3.5 was the prior version before dig 4 basically entirely a PHP software running on distributed MySQL and this was like a different era right so dig was running on hardware that we owned in like a colo and so it wasn't like just spin up some capacity or whatnot. But DIG v4 was trying to solve a bunch of problems. But first and foremost, the internet was changing at that time.

所以，Digg 曾一度是排名前十的网站，但后来开始被 Facebook 抢去风头，搜索流量也开始下滑。随后，Google 进行了一系列重大调整。So this dig at one point a top 10 website was starting to lose traction to Facebook. and it was starting to lose search traffic as well. And so there were a series of large Google changes.

我觉得这些天我们已经不太常听到 Google 搜索算法的变化了，但那时候有 Google Panda 算法更新，还有其他几次更新。它们开始真正重塑流量的流向。像 Dig 这样的公司，我想说，相当大一部分流量，大约 60% 到 70%，实际上都是通过搜索带来的。And I think we don't hear about Google search algorithm changes that much these days, but back then there was like the Google Panda algorithm change and there were a handful of others. and they were starting to really reshape how traffic flowed through. So for a company like Dig, a substantial amount of the traffic, I want to say like 60 to 70% the traffic was actually coming in via search.

主持人：哦，Host: Oh,

Will Larson：变成一种叫作永久链接的东西。永久链接页面会是这样的：比如说你写了一篇很棒的博客文章，我们会把它发到 Digg 上，然后附上永久链接的引用，也会放一个指向你网站的小链接，当然还会加上评论。但我们会通过这些永久页面带来大量流量，而这些页面的 PageRank 会比原始来源本身更高。Will Larson: into something called the permal link. And so the permal link pages would be like say you write a great blog post. We that would then get posted to dig and then we'd have the reference to the permal link and also like a small link to your site u of course and comments about it. But we would take a ton of traffic through these permanent pages that would be higher page rank than the original source themselves.

你现在可以说，也许我们本来就不该这么做，可能确实不该。我想这大概就是今天的看法。但从当时的角度来看，我们其实是在让人们发现它，并围绕它展开讨论。那时还没有 Twitter。And you can argue like now like maybe we shouldn't have been probably not. I think that would be kind of the perspective today. But from the perspective of that moment like we were actually creating the discoverability and the conversation around it. This was before Twitter.

那是在 Facebook 还没有获得大规模分发量之前。当时真的是非常早期的阶段。所以对我们来说，那是人们进入的核心入口。This was before Facebook got like substantial distribution. This was really early moment. And so for us like that was the core of where people came into.

而且那确实是我们卖出最多广告的地方。所以失去那部分流量，基本上就让公司的财务前景岌岌可危。从外部看来，Digg 之前运营得相当不错。你知道，看起来可能是在增长，但实际上我们知道，Digg 在萎缩。我们有过一个漂亮的盈利月份，随后算法发生了变化。我们开始萎缩，也知道这对我们来说是生死攸关的。also it was really where we sold the most ads. And so losing that traffic was basically tanking the company's like financial kind of prospects. And so dig before from the outside DIG was working pretty well. It was you know seemed like maybe it was growing but really like what we knew is like dig was shrinking. we had one beautiful month of profitability and then an algorithm change hit. and we started shrinking and we knew that ex this is existential for us.

再沿着这条路走不了多远，我们就会直接不复存在了。我加入的时候，我想大概有110到120个人吧，差不多是这个规模。但那是在2010年，你知道，那时候融资轮的金额通常是100万美元、300万美元之类的。跟今天不一样，现在人们融资，你知道，能融到5亿美元，团队规模想有多大都行。那真是一个截然不同的时代。We were going to simply not exist not that far down the path and we were when I joined I want to say like 110 120 people something like this but this was this was in you know 2010 when funding rounds were a million dollars or $3 million or something. It's not like today when people are raising, you know, $500 million and you can have a team of however many or it was a very different moment.

所以即便有110个人，那笔开销也相当大，我们很快就把剩下的资金消耗得差不多了。So even with 110 people that was pretty substantial and we were we were running down re you know the remaining coffers pretty pretty fast.

主持人：从内部来看，这次上线情况糟糕吗？顺利吗？因为从外界来看，人们似乎觉得它搞得一团糟。大家——我觉得其中很大一部分是社区对此感到不满，但也有些人在庆祝，觉得“他们把事情搞砸了，他们活该”，你知道吧？尤其是那些深度参与其中的人，他们不喜欢改变。首先，有人画了一组特别有意思的漫画，讲的是 Digg 对 Reddit：Digg 是蓝色的，Reddit 是红色的，然后两边爆发了一场大战。有人画了四五篇，像是一部情节非常复杂的漫画，讲的就是那段时间前后的事。挺有意思的，能看到人们为此投入了多少精力。Host: The launch internally did it go poorly? Did it go well? Because from the outside again there was a perception that it went terribly and people there was a bit I think a lot of it was the community was upset and then there was a bit of celebration as well like well they messed it up like they kind of deserve that you know the mob the people especially who were very involved they didn't like change first there's like a really fascinating set of cartoons someone made which is like dig versus reddit and like dig is like blue and then like reddit's red and there's this like giant war that someone did like a four or five part it's like this very intricate comic someone wrote about around around this time and it's kind of interesting to see how much energy people put into it.

不过，是的，大家确实都很有热情。我觉得，拥有一个非常热情的社群所面临的挑战之一就是：当你培育出一个热情的社群后，如果你改变了自己的定位，社群就不喜欢了。我的意思是，确实有这样一些人，比如 Mr. Baby Man 就是其中很有代表性的一位，他算是 Digg 上最顶尖的内容策展人之一——自发地挑选内容并把它们推上首页的那种策展人。你知道，他和很多其他人一样，某种程度上失去了自己的生计，对吧？不过这次上线表现很糟。为什么会这么糟？原因有很多。首先，从技术上说，产品上线时其实还没准备好，所以我们做了很多非常激进的技术决策。再说一次，我是在上线前三个月左右才加入的，所以我个人不认为自己要承担太多责任。But yeah, there was a lot of passion and I think it's one of the challenges of like a really passionate community is like when you foster a passionate community then you change what you are. Community doesn't like that because I mean there are literally these folks like Mr. baby man was like a really big one like one of the top dig kind of curators un unsolicited curators of content getting to the front page and he you know he and many others were they lost kind of their business right but the launch went pretty poorly and why did it go poorly it went poorly for a lot of reasons so first the launch technically wasn't really ready and so we made a lot of really aggressive technology decisions and again I came in about 3 months before this went went live so I don't personally take a ton of responsibility.

我也再次想起自己当时处于职业生涯的哪个阶段。那基本上是我的第二份工作。我在雅虎已经工作了两年。所以这件事我不会负责。I also again think about where I was in my career. I was basically was my second job. I'd been at Yahoo for two years. So I won't own this one.

在我职业生涯后期，对于发生的一切，我都会承担责任。但这次真的不是我的错。基本上，我们决定在 Cassandra 上线。当时有个玩笑，说 Cassandra 简直就是特洛伊木马，推出它就是为了破坏行业竞争，因为任何基于 Cassandra 上线的公司之后基本都会陷入困境。我觉得 Digg 确实就是这样。我们用 Cassandra 来替换分片的 MySQL 系统。那个分片的 MySQL 系统相当复杂，但确实能正常运行。I later in my career I'll own I'll own anything that happened. But this one wasn't really my fault. But basically we made the decision to launch on Cassandra. And there's like a joke at the time which is that Cassandra was a Trojan horse basically had launched to basically ruin competition in the industry because anyone who launched on Cassandra was basically screwed afterwards which I think certainly was true for dig and so running Cassandra to replace the sharted my SQL system. that sharted my SQL system was pretty complicated, but it definitely worked.

而且我想说，Cassandra 基本上没能正常工作。不过我记得，在我们上线之前，有个团队负责对 Cassandra 进行负载测试。And Cassandra, I would argue like basically didn't work. But I remember there was a team responsible for load testing Cassandra before our launch.

而且就在上线前两天，另一个叫 Rich 的人——他特别棒——他和我被叫到一边，有人说：“嘿，他们一直没做压力测试。接下来两天你们俩得把压力测试做了。”Rich 跟我一样，就是个软件工程师。所以我们就想，好吧，那就先装个 JMeter，再想办法弄明白怎么用它做压力测试吧。And two days before the launch, this other guy Rich who's who was fantastic. He and I were p pulled aside like, "Hey, well, they never did the load testing. We need the two of you to do the load testing, you know, in the next two days." And so Rich was just like a software engineer like me. And so we're like, well, I guess we'll like install JMeter and try to figure out how JMeter works to do some load testing.

我们和 Chris 进行了一场特别有意思的对话，他算是 Cassandra 项目的负责人。我说：“嘿，我没法从 Cassandra 读取数据。”他说：“这不是真的。”我说：“好吧，那我没法写入数据。”他说：“这也不是真的。”我说：“好吧，Chris，如果我往 Cassandra 写入数据，就没法从 Cassandra 读取数据；如果我从 Cassandra 读取数据，就没法往 Cassandra 写入数据。”And we had this like really interesting conversation with Chris, who is kind of the head of the Cassandra initiative. I was like, "Hey, like I can't do the reads on Cassandra." He's like, "That's not true." I was like, "Well, I can't do the rights." He's like, "That's also not true." I'm like, "Okay, Chris, if I'm writing to Cassandra, I can't read from Cassandra. If I'm reading from Cassandra, I can't write to Cassandra."

他就像是说：“这是真的。”然后又像是说：“嗯，我们两天后就该上线了。”接着我们就上线了，也没把问题修好。我们就这么上线了。所以我觉得，公司当时以为我们真的快要完蛋了，而公司实际上也确实快要撑不下去了。公司快没钱了，但那是我职业生涯中经历过最有意思的一天。我不记得自己几点到办公室的了，大概是早上八点左右。He's like, "That is true." It's like, "Well, we're supposed to launch in two days." And then we launched and we didn't fix it. We just launched. And so I think the company thought that we were literally dying and the company was the company literally was dying. It was running out of money, but it was it was like the most interesting day I've ever had professionally. Can't remember when I got to the office. Probably around 8:00 a.m.

主持人：你说的“有意思”，其实是指压力很大。Host: When you say interesting, you mean stressful.

Will Larson：我可以稍微给你描绘一下当时的场景。那天既是产品发布日，他们还决定办一场发布派对。所以一整天都有穿着燕尾服的餐饮服务人员，端着寿司拼盘和香槟到处走。Will Larson: You can let me like paint the scene a little bit. So it was a launch, but they also decided to have a launch party. So the entire day there were caterers kind of in tuxedos with like sushi trays, champagne.

主持人：哦，哇。Host: Oh wow.

Will Larson：于是整个办公室的人都到了，搞了这么一场庆祝活动。房间中央有张桌子，可能是会议桌之类的，他们还搬来了一张巨大的桌子，可能有这张桌子的三四倍大，工程师们就坐在那里。我们没有足够的硬件让新系统和旧系统同时运行。再说一次，这些硬件都是我们自己拥有的。Will Larson: And so like the entire office was there to have this like kind of like celebration. And then in the center of the room there was this like table this it might have been like a boardroom table or something and pulled out this giant table maybe three or four times the size of this where the engineers were sitting. And we didn't have enough hardware to run the new system and the old system concurrently. And again this was hardware we owned.

所以他们确实是在清除旧服务器并安装新软件。我们没法回滚。我们没有钱……或者说，而且再说一次，因为我们的钱快花光了，但办派对的预算还够，可服务器的预算却不够，对吧？所以我们在一台接一台地清除服务器。So they were literally wiping the old servers and installing the new software. So we couldn't roll back. We didn't didn't have the money to or the and because again we were running out of money but enough budget for the party but like not enough budget for the servers, right? So we were wiping server by server

主机：正在启动它Host: spinning it up

威尔·拉森：结果到头来，那该死的东西根本没启动。实际情况就是这样，对吧？所以我们挂了一个“维护中”页面，我想大概挂了24小时，然后在香槟和燕尾服都送到的时候，我们总算把它撤掉了。真是超现实。Will Larson: and ultimately like the damn thing didn't turn on. It was functionally what happened, right? And so we had this you know like down for maintenance page up for I think roughly 24 hours and then we were able to scrap while the champagne and the tuxedos are coming around. Surreal

Will Larson：楼上的人还在做按摩。你知道，我记得有些不便透露名字的团队，在我们努力把这个东西上线时还在打乒乓球。那感觉就像……有点像魔幻现实主义。Will Larson: and there were people upstairs getting massages. There were you know I remember certain groups who won't be named playing pingpong while we're trying to get this up and it was it was just like it was sort of like a magical realism.

主持人：我明白你说的“有意思”是什么意思。这完全不是我想象中这种发布会会有的样子。你根本不可能想象这样的发布会。那一刻真的太超现实了，简直像魔幻现实主义中的场景：一切都在照常进行，而这个网站却几乎要彻底崩溃了。那真是我从未见过的场面，但我也为那一刻感到无比自豪。Host: I see what you mean by interesting. This is not how I imagined a launch like this. You can never imagine a launch like this. It was just it was so surreal truly like a magical realism moment where there's kind of all this normaly happening while this like site's literally imploding and it was just it was unlike anything I've seen but it's also like a moment I take a lot of pride in.

所以我在那里待了三个月。我觉得有意思的是，我们确实让网站勉强运转起来了，但问题很多，于是大家就放弃了。日复一日，人们渐渐不再出现，最后只剩下一小群人大概六个人，努力让它继续运行。我们做到了。头两天里，我和一个叫Rich的人从零开始，在Redis上搭建了一套缓存系统，这让网站能连续运行好几个小时。And so I've been there 3 months. I think interesting thing is we did get the site kind of working but there were a lot of issues and so people just gave up and like day by day like people just stopped showing up and like a small group was really the only group left of maybe like six people trying to keep it working and we did and so we in the first two days like the same guy Rich and I wrote like a caching system from scratch on top of Reddus which helped the site stay on for hours

主持人：yHost: y

Will Larson：但我们当时仍然有严重的内存泄漏，所以实际上每隔一两个小时就得重启每个进程。唯一能让服务持续运行的办法，就是对每个进程逐一进行滚动重启。我们花了整整一个月才排查出问题。我很久以前写过一篇博客讲这件事，但基本上，核心 bug 是：我们创建了一个供第三方使用的 API 服务，它是用 Python 写的。编写这个服务的人不太懂 Python。当时整个调用链是：Python 调用另一个 Python gRPC 服务，而那个服务会访问 Cassandra。基本上，在 Python 里，如果你实例化一个默认参数，而它是可变对象——我不知道现在是不是还这样，真希望不是，但当时确实如此——比如把一个列表设为默认参数，然后修改它，比如往里面追加 ID，那么这些修改就会一直保留在内存里。因此，每次调用那个函数时，拿到的都会是同一个字典，或者同一个列表。于是用户 ID 就一直留在内存里；每次他们调用这个 API 查询用户 ID、取回用户对象时，情况都是如此。Will Larson: but we're still had huge memory leaks and so we're actually like restarting every process every you know like hour or two and the only way to keep it up was rolling restarts of every every process. And so it took us like a full month to debug and I have like a blog post I wrote a long time ago about it but basically the core bug was we created an API service that could be used for like third parties and it was in Python. the people writing it didn't know Python very well and this was Python then calling like another Python gRPC that was hitting Cassandra and basically in Python when you instantiate a default parameter if it's mutable I don't know if this is still true by the way I hope it's not so true but at the time it was true where if you basically put a list as a default parameter and then you mutated it like appended ids into it would persist in memory and so each time that function was called would have the same diction or the same list and So the memory of the user ids basically every time they call this API to look up user ids to get the user objects back.

所有曾经传入其中的用户都会一直留在那里。于是问题就这样一次又一次地连锁发生，直到我们重启。后来我们在这两者之间加装了 memcache，但 memcache 开始崩溃，然后你知道，它又会把 Cassandra 搞垮。所以，要找到那个 bug，我想我花了整整四周。找到之后修起来倒是很简单，但我们把它弄好之后，我们的新 CEO 就上任了——我想这基本上就是我修好它的同一天。然后，接下来一年里，基本上整个公司的人都被裁掉了。所以……All the users that were ever passed into it would still be there. And so it just cascaded over and over and over until we restarted and we installed memcache kind of in between these and the memcache would start falling over and then it would you know destroy Cassandra. so really finding that bug it took me I think four weeks to actually find it. once you found it trivial to fix, but we got it up and then our new CEO started I think that basically the same day that I fixed that and then we you know basically the entire company got laid off over the next year. So

主持人：是的，Host: yeah,

Will Larson：从某种意义上说，这算是彻底胜利，因为我们确实解决了问题。它当时是能用的，但我觉得中央网站不能难用或者瘫痪一个月之久。不过，假设一下，公司还能有什么不同的做法呢？如果他们只是继续维护旧网站，公司也会倒闭，对吧？所以我不知道他们当时是不是做了错误的选择，但那时候我确实对此非常非常不爽。Will Larson: pure victory in the sense that we did solve it. It was working but I think you can't really have the central site be hard to use or down for like a month. But like if you go to the counterfactual, what would the company have done differently? If they had simply kept up the old site, they also would have died, right? And so I don't know that they made the wrong choice, but at the time I certainly was pretty pretty salty about it.

主持人：是的。你后来是怎么走上工程领导岗位的？Host: Yeah. How did you eventually get into engineering leadership?

Will 晋升工程领导岗位的历程Will’s path to eng leadership

我知道你和我在 Uber 工作的时间有一点重叠。实际上，我们都在那里工作过，但从未共事过。I know you and me over overlapped a little bit at Uber. Actually, we both worked there, but we never worked together.

Will Larson：所以，DIG 故事的结尾就是我们被收购了。他们卖掉了 DIG 的专利；DIG 做了很多创新。比如广告或信息流广告单元，基本上就像你现在在 X 上看到的那种广告，看起来有点像用户发布的动态。DIG 拥有这项专利，是第一家这么做的公司。他们还拥有各种其他专利，因此整个专利组合被一家公司收购了。Dig.com，也就是那个品牌和网站本身，当时我想是被纽约的 Betaworks 收购了。Will Larson: So the kind of the end of the DIG story was we got aqua hired. And so they sold the patents for DIG did a lot of like innovation. So like in ad or instream ad units basically like you see it on X now where they'll have like an ad that kind of looks like the stories from people that are posting like DIG owned the patent of that. They were the first company to do it. They own like a variety of other patents and so the patent portfolio got acquired by one company. Dig.com like the actual like brand and the website got hired acquired by I think Beta Works out of New York at the time.

我想他们几年后把它卖掉了，后来团队被 SocialCode 收购了。SocialCode 算是第三家公司，是华盛顿邮报公司旗下的子公司；当时华盛顿邮报公司还是一家控股公司，旗下拥有《华盛顿邮报》、Kaplan 和 SocialCode。SocialCode 基本上是在 Facebook 上做广告的，所以团队就去了那里。我在那里待了几年。但我离开时就在想，好吧，我想从事工程管理方面的领导工作，可我没法应聘到一个很大的职位，因为那时候我大概只管理着一个由 12 名工程师组成的团队之类的。我没法应聘那个大职位，因为我还没做过那么大的职位。I think they've sold it subsequently a few years ago and then the team got acquired by social code which is like a third company a subsidiary of the Washington Post company from the time when that was a holding company that own owned the post Kaplan and this company social code which basically did advertising on Facebook and so the team went there and I was there for a couple of years but when I when I left I was thinking about okay I want to be kind of in engineering leadership but I can't get hired into a really large role because at that time I was managing maybe a team of 12 engineers or something like that. I can't get hired into this big role because I haven't done the big role.

比如，我们要怎样才能被聘到这么重要的职位上？所以，如果你在一家小型初创公司，问题是它的规模还没到那个程度。Like how do we get hired into this big role? And so if you're at a small startup, like you just there's the scale is not there.

即使你去这家只有15人的初创公司担任工程负责人，那儿也就只有5名工程师。所以你永远无法达到这些大型职位所要求的规模。从那以后，我当时关注的事情，以及我对这个话题的看法，都发生了很大变化。但说实话，这就是我当时的想法：如果我想管理一个大型团队，就得加入一家发展非常迅速的公司。于是我四处看看，哪些公司发展得很快。Uber，当时Uber发展得真的非常、非常、非常快。Even if you go be a head of engineering at this 15 person startup, there's just five engineers there. And so you can never get into the scale they're looking for these large roles. And so my what I was looking about at the time and my thoughts on this topic changed a lot since then. But this just like honestly where I was. It's like, well, if I want to manage a large team, I got to join a company that's growing really quickly. And I kind of looked around and like where is growing really quickly. And like Uber Uber was growing really, really, really quickly.

主持人：15 16Host: 15 16

Will Larson：我觉得这是2014年。Will Larson: I think this is 2014.

主持人：那时增长才刚刚起步，非常早期。Host: This is when growth just started to kick off. Like this was very early.

Will Larson：这还挺早的。Will Larson: This is pretty early.

主持人：你得身在旧金山，才会知道 Uber 做得有多好。我觉得，旧金山以外的人是从 2015 年开始听说这件事的，到 2016 年，它已经成了全球性的新闻。Host: You had to be in San Francisco to know that Uber was doing really well. Like outside of SF, I think I think news started to spread in 2015 and then by 2016 it was a global news.

Will Larson：听起来没错。不过我之所以知道，是因为 DIG 的一位工程师 Jeremy Grosser 当时在那边负责基础设施，后来离开并加入了 Uber。实际上，这里有一条挺有意思的技术采用曲线：DIG 开发了这些技术，其中一个叫 clust。我觉得采用这个工具的可能只有三家公司：DIG、Uber，还有 Second Life——那家公司我忘了实际叫什么了，总之也许全世界只有这三家公司用过 clust。它基本上是一个键值存储，用来管理某种集群基础设施，有点像 HashiCorp 的 Consul，非常非常相似。Will Larson: That sounds right. But the way I knew is that one of the engineers Jeremy Grosser from DIG who was on infrastructure there left and joined Uber. And actually this there's like a interesting technology adoption curve because DIG made all these technologies. is one of them is called clust which I think dig Uber and then like Second Life that company I forget their actual name but whatever it is maybe the only three companies in the world that ever adopted this tool clust but it managed basically a key value store to manage kind of ster infrastructure a little bit like a console from from Hashi Corp is very very similar

主持人：就在主机发售前几年Host: just years before console was out

Will Larson：对，它可能最初是在2008年、2009年左右开发的吧。于是他实际上把 Dig 那边的大量技术栈都带到了 Uber，因为他是那里的首批基础设施工程师之一。所以你知道，他的团队当时在招人，而我确实算是个通才工程师。比如在 Yahoo，我实际上是受聘做前端工程的，虽然我也不确定自己是不是特别胜任。后来在 Dig，我做过前端、Cassandra 相关工作、后端，基本上什么都做。Will Larson: yeah it was probably made originally in like 2008 2009 something like that and so he had actually brought like a ton of the dig stack over into Uber because he was one of the first infrastructure engineers there and so you know his team was hiring and I really was like a generalist engineer like at Yahoo I was actually hired to do front-end engineering which I don't know if I super qualified for and then at Dig I was doing you know frontend Cassandra work backend just like everything

主持人：yHost: y

Will Larson：后来他们聘我来负责这个 SRE 团队，但它其实并不算真正的 SRE 团队，只是一个他们称作 SRE 的基础设施团队。你知道，我在入职前一周读了一本 SRE 相关的书，想弄清楚这份工作到底是做什么的。Will Larson: and then they hired me to kind of run this S sur team but it wasn't really an S sur team it was just like an infrastructure team that they called SRE. You know, I read like an SR book like the week before trying to figure out what the job was.

主持人：你可能读过那本现有的 SRE 书，也就是谷歌的 SRE 书，对吧？Host: You probably read the SRE book that existed, which is the Google SRE book, right?

Will Larson：我觉得那本书并不存在，Ben。不过也有可能存在。Will Larson: I don't think that book existed, Ben. It might have.

主持人：你当时能接触到哪本书？Host: What book did you have access?

Will Larson：我觉得我当时读的可能是一本 DevOps 方面的书。那时候《凤凰项目》可能刚出版。我记不清具体时间线是不是这样了，但应该是类似《凤凰项目》那本书。也许还有另一本。我就这样去面试了，当然，典型的面试嘛，我记得自己在白板上用 Python 解旅行推销员问题之类的东西，这其实并不能很好地评估我的 DevOps 能力。不过不知怎么的，我觉得当时公司在招聘上有点急切，但最后还是录用了我，我也就入职了。Will Larson: I think I think there was a DevOps book might have been what I was reading. and it might have been like the the Phoenix Project might have been out around then. I'm forgetting if that the exact timeline, but there was something like the Phoenix Project. Maybe there was one other. and I just showed up and then of course like classic interview I remember doing the traveling salesman problem on a whiteboard in Python stuff stuff like that which didn't really evaluate my DevOps acumen very well but you somehow I think the company was a little bit desperate on hiring at that point but did get the job and started.

Uber, Stripe, Carta, and Calm

主持人：然后你已经在带领团队、扩充团队了。我加入时，团队大概有六个人，但要负责的事情范围非常广。我加入时，Uber有2000名员工，其中有200名工程师。这个大约六人的团队负责管理我们的数据库、Kafka，还有实际的服务器——呃，不是服务器本身，而是服务器的管理。Host: And then you were leading a team already you were growing a team. So the team when I joined I probably was managing like six people but it was managing like an incredibly broad range of responsibilities. So Uber when I joined was 2,000 people. It was 200 engineers and this team of about six was managing our databases our Kafka like our actual servers not well the management of the servers.

有一个技术运维团队，负责给服务器上机架并安装。但服务器上架后，就由我们来管理了。服务配置方面，基本上除了有一个两人规模的开发者体验团队之外，其他一切都归我们管。有这么一个技术运维团队，确实负责把服务器装上机架并安装好，但其他所有基础设施都由我们负责，这段经历相当特别。There was a tech ops team that managed literally racking them and installing them. But once they were racked, we managed that. Our service provisioning like we owned basically everything other than there was like a twoerson developer experience team. There was this tech ops team that actually like racked and installed the servers, but we owned all the other infrastructure and it was it was quite an experience.

主持人：然后，单说你的领导历程和管理经历。你在 Uber 是从这个团队起步的。后来发展到了什么阶段？之后在 Stripe 和 Carta 之间又经历了哪些步骤？Host: And then in terms of just focusing on your leadership journey, your management journey. So at Uber, you started at this team. How far did it go and then what were the next steps between Stripe Carta?

Will Larson：是的，当然。我加入时，那个团队大概有五六个人。两年后我离开时，团队已经有 70 人了，而且全都是通过外部招聘来的。我觉得那时 Uber 最令人惊叹的一点，就是工程团队的人数每六个月就翻一番。Will Larson: Yeah, absolutely. So when I joined that team was I think roughly five or six folks. When I left two years later that team was 70 and that was all external hiring. And I think that was like the most kind of amazing thing about Uber at that point is like Uber doubled the engine headcount every 6 months.

所以你不能随便从其他团队挖人，因为那些团队也在大量招人，而且自己都忙得不可开交。所以我真的是在 Uber 学会了怎么招聘的。加入 Uber 之前，我完全不知道怎么招人，但他们当时招了特别多的人。我最喜欢的故事之一是，有个来自 Eventbrite 的人，我带了他一年半。有一次我周五下午四点半左右给他发了录用通知，他周一早上八点就来上班了。And so you can't just like steal people from other teams cuz those teams are hiring a ton too and also really underwater. And so I really learned how to hire at Uber. I had no idea how to hire before I joined Uber, but they were just hiring so many folks. I think one of my favorite stories was there's this guy out of Eventbrite that I that I managed for a year and a half that would give him an offer at like 4:30 p.m. on a Friday and he started Monday at 8.

但我有很多，比如 Uber 的招聘故事。But I have so many like Uber hiring stories.

有些事情就是比其他事情更好笑。我记得有个人在 Uber 面试了四次，我还看到他第五次去面试。他被拒了四次，团队又第五、第五、第五、第五次面试他。我当时就想，我们不能录用这家伙，我们都已经面试他四次了，别再浪费他的时间了。可他还是拿到了那个团队的 offer，加入了他们，然后六个小时之内就辞职了，去接受了另一个 offer，因为他收到了 Twitter 的 offer，而 Twitter 就在附近，隔一条街。Like some of them like funnier than than others. I remember someone who interviewed with Uber four times and I saw him interviewing a fifth time. and they got rejected four times and the team interviewed him a fifth fifth fifth fifth time I was like we cannot hire this guy we've already interviewed him like four times like stop wasting his time but he got an offer for that team and he joined and then he quit within six hours and took a different offer that because he got an offer from Twitter which was right down right a block a block away

主持人：隔着一个街区，或者也有人……Host: a block away or somebody was also

Will Larson：他在 Uber 的面试时间比实际在那里工作的时间还长——尽管他最后接受了那份工作。关于 Uber 的经历，真是有太多太多离奇的故事了。但那支团队在两年里从 6 人发展到 70 人，我们的职责范围在那段时间也大幅扩大。那真是一段非常疯狂的时期。你知道，如今有些公司让我觉得很像当时在 Uber 的经历。但我刚加入 Uber 时，基本上每到周五，我们都得手动在服务器之间重新分配软件，尽力让服务器保持运行，因为通常周五的通勤高峰是我们一周中流量最高的时候。周六的流量可能更大，但会分散到更多小时里，因为大家不会在同一时间下班。Will Larson: he spent he spent more time interviewing for Uber than working there despite accepting the job and there are just like so many so many wild stories from the Uber experience there but that team 6 to 70 over two years and our scope increased a lot in that time but it was just like a really wild time and it's hard you know some of the companies today I think remind me a lot of that Uber experience but Uber when I joined basically every Friday we were literally manually reallocating software between servers trying to keep the servers up because typically Friday rush hour was our peak time the of the week though a Saturday you might have more volume but that would be like spread over more hours because people aren't all leaving work at the exact same time.

有太多各种离谱的故事，讲的都是那地方工作起来有多疯狂。So many kind of wild stories of just like what a manic place that was to work at.

但我在那里待了几年。后来我去了 Stripe。2016 年到 2020 年初，我在 Stripe 待了大约四年。之后我其实在 comm 待了三年半。那是我的第一份 CTO 工作。当时这个决定其实是经过深思熟虑的。我想我当时确实很担心。我在 Stripe 已经待了四年。你知道，Stripe 的发展非常好。我想我加入时它的估值是 55 亿美元，四年后我记得已经达到 960 亿美元。But I was there for a couple of years. Then I went to Stripe. I was at Stripe for about four years from 2016 through early 2020. Then I was actually at comm and a half, three years. CTO as that was my first CTO job. It was really kind of deliberate at that point. I think I was really worried. So I'd been at Stripe for four years. You know, Stripe had done really well. I think I joined at 5.5 billion and I think it was at 96 billion four years later.

主持人：公司估值。是的，Host: Company valuation. Yeah,

Will Larson：这件事确实逐渐成形了。不过我也觉得，我们做的工作的质量一直很不错。我想说，我加入 Stripe 时，公司大约有 500 名员工。我不确定是我本人还是同一批加入的其他人是第 500 名员工，但我离开时，公司大概有 1,500 到 2,000 人。那段时间 Stripe 的年增长率约为 70%，比 Uber 慢得多，Uber 每 6 个月就翻一倍。当然，后来 Uber 的收缩幅度也比 Stripe 有过的任何时候都要大得多。Will Larson: it really came together. But the also I think the quality of the work we were doing was going really well. And I want to say I was roughly someone that joined the day I joined at Stripe was an employee of 500. I don't know if that was me or someone else in the batch, but I think by the time I left it was 1.5 to 2,000 folks, something at the company. And so Stripe grew about 70% year-over-year the period that I was there, which is a lot less than Uber, which doubled every 6 months. And obviously like Uber subsequently contracted much more aggressively than than Stripe ever did,

主持人：这是每六个月翻一番的自然结果。Host: which is the natural consequence of doubling every every six months.

主持人：YHost: Y

Will Larson：但那时我只是有点担心，我几乎所有的积蓄都放在同一家公司里，而这家公司永远不会上市——我觉得事实也确实如此。所以这算是某种程度上的分散投资，但我也想知道，真正全面担任领导角色是什么感觉？在 Stripe 的整个任职期间，我基本上都离 CEO 只有一级之遥。所以第一年我向 Jeff Winter 汇报，之后向 David Singleton 汇报，他在我剩余的……Will Larson: but at that point I was just worried that like my entire kind of like savings were all in one company that was never going to go public, which I think has been true. And so it was like a bit of a diversification play, but also the desire to what does it actually feel like to fully lead? And so for my entire time at Stripe, I was basically, you know, one step away from the CEO. So reporting into Jeff Winter for my first year, then into David Singleton, who was my manager for the rest of the

主持人：Stripe 的首席技术官，后来——或者也许当时也是。Host: Stripe's CTO later or maybe at that time as well.

Will Larson：他受聘时是以首席技术官的身份加入的。不，不是这样。他加入时担任工程负责人。Will Larson: He was hire he joined as the CTO. No, that's not true. He joined as the head of engineering

Will Larson：然后大概一两年后，他就成了 CTO 之类的。但从他加入公司起，直到我在 2020 年初离职，我一直向他汇报。所以我始终离那个位置只有一步之遥。我当时就在想，要是我能坐上那个位置呢？我能不能把事情做得更好一些？无论如何，这似乎是值得一试的事，而从那以后我也一直从中学到很多。Will Larson: and then he became the CTO maybe a year or two later, something like that. But I was reporting to him from when he joined through through the time I departed in early 2020. So I was always one step away. But I was like, what if I could get into that seat? Could I could I do things some better? And that seemed like the right thing to try for anyway and has been educational ever since.

主持人：之后你又担任过几份 CTO 职务。你先是在 Calm 做了三年半的 CTO，然后去了 Cardo。Host: And then you have had several CTO gigs then. So it was Calm three and a half year CTO. Then you were at Cardo.

Will Larson：我在 COM 待了大概三年半，然后在 Cardo 待了两年，之后大概一年前、一年半前加入了 Imprint，也就是我现在所在的公司。Will Larson: So I was at COM for I think three and a half years. Then I was at Cardo for two years and then I joined imprint a year year and a half ago something like that which is where I am today.

主持人：好的。Host: Okay.

CTO 的职责是什么？What does a CTO do?

所以现在我已经是第三次担任 CTO 了。我想问问你，作为一名工程师，CTO 到底是做什么的？如果你回想一下自己还是工程师的时候——当然，我觉得自己当工程师时也曾有过这样的愿望：哇，哪天能当上 CTO 就好了。因为在你看来，这个职位既涉及一些管理工作，而你看到的很多 CTO 又都很技术派，和实际工作也很贴近。你怎么看 CTO 这个角色？我知道你还写过一本关于工程领域高管职业发展的书，对这个问题也有很多种回答。但你自己的思维模型是什么？你以前是怎么想的，现在又是怎么想的？尤其是现在有了 AI，我觉得你的角色也发生了变化。So now I three times CTO I need to ask you what does a CTO do as as as an engineer? like let's like if if if you put yourself back as as being an engineer of course I think I myself had aspirations when I was an engineer like oh it could be nice to one day be a CTO because in your mind it's like well it has some management but it's also a lot of CTOs you see are technical and close to the thing how do you find the CTO I know you have a book on this as well on engineering executive careers and there's a lot of answers but what is your mental model how was it and how is it now especially because now with AI I think your role has changed.

Will Larson：我觉得，在 2010 年代，做工程经理最糟糕的事情之一就是，我记得，当你开始跻身工程管理层时，最先学到的教训之一就是：“嘿，你以后再也不能做技术决策了。”以前就是这样的，对吧？我记得……Will Larson: I think one of the worst parts of being a engineering manager in the 2010s is I think like when you joined the ranks of engineering management like one of the first lessons you'd get is like hey you need to never make a technical decision again. That's what it used to be, right? I remember

Will Larson：那确实就是我当时听到的说法。我觉得你会看到，人们认为最重要的是放手，不要插手技术决策；那时的理念就是这样，而今天显然已经不是了。但我想，我真正很向往的一点是，CTO 是唯一一个让工程职业道路——技术导向的道路和管理道路——汇合的职位。所以我一直很坚定地相信、直到今天也在践行的一件事，就是既让工程经理，也让工程师个人贡献者直接向我汇报。我担任 CTO 时都是这样做的。现在我有 14 位直接下属，我想其中四五位是 IC，其余都是经理。Will Larson: that is that's like literally, you know, what I was told and I think you'd see people like the most important thing is to let go about technology decisions and this was the ethos then and that's definitely not the ethos today. But I think the thing that I kind of aspirationally really loved is the CTO was like the only place where this like engineering kind of career, this technical oriented one and this managerial one converged. And so one of the things I've believed strongly in and continue to do today is having both engineering managers but also like individual contributor engineers report directly into me and CTO roles. And so today I have 14 direct reports right now and I think four or five of them are IC's and then the rest are managers.

但要做到这种平衡，实际上在很多管理岗位上，你就是不能当技术负责人，至少很长一段时间里都是如此。But having that balance is like really for many roles in management you're just not allowed to be a technical leader or you weren't for a long time.

所以对我来说，实际上能够达到技术和管理再次交汇的层级，并且能在技术和管理两方面担任领导者，是一大吸引力。不过，外面确实有太多糟糕的 CTO 决策了。我这么说并不是想影射我提到过的任何人。我觉得戴维尤其出色。And so to me, actually getting to the level where you're they converged again and you were allowed to be a leader on the technology and the management side was like one of the big appeals. But also like there just there's so many like bad CTO decisions out there. And I don't I don't mean this to reflect any of the individuals I've talked about. I think David in particular was like really excellent.

Stripe 的决策总体来说质量相当高。所以有时候你可能会想“我不同意”，但不会觉得“这简直毫无道理”。不过，尤其是在 Stripe 经历之外，你知道，有些决策就是让人摸不着头脑，我当时觉得也许我能做得更好。但我想，最近这段时间我特别喜欢的一点是，你不只是又被允许深入细节，而是可以说，你确实需要这么做。And the decisions at Stripe were generally decision quality at Stripe was pretty high. And so sometimes you could be like I disagree but you couldn't be like this makes literally no sense. But often like, you know, especially outside of the Stripe experience, there were just decisions that like just didn't make sense and I thought like maybe I could do it better. But I think the thing that I've really loved in the most recent kind of era is like you're really like not just allowed to be in the details again, like you're really sort of required to be.

对我来说，这大概就是在这个时代重返软件行业最有意思的部分。我想，你知道，我在 Imprint 一年半里提交了 500 多个拉取请求，而且都一路进了生产环境，这比我之前整个职业生涯加起来做的还要多得多。这挺酷的，而且这……And that to me has been like the very most fun part of being back in software in this era is I think I you know I've done over 500 pull requests in a year and a half at imprint going all the way to production which is substantially more than I did in my prior career combined. and that's pretty cool and that's

主持人：然后你加入了 Imprint，担任 CTO。你在 Imprint 的职位不只是 CTO 吗？Host: and then you did imprint as CTO. Are you more than CTO at imprint?

Will 在 Imprint 的角色Will’s role at Imprint

Will Larson：所以我以 CTO 的身份加入，现在也在某种程度上领导着产品设计团队。没错，产品设计和工程团队都向同一个人汇报。Will Larson: So I joined as the CTO and right now I'm also kind of leading the product design teams. Right. So product design and engineering all reporting into one person.

主持人：是的，这就像一种统一的 EPD 结构。Host: Yeah, it's like a unified EPD structure.

主持人：这是一个新趋势吗？把这些职能都放在一个人身上？因为我大概两年前开始听说 CTPO，也就是首席技术与产品官；两三年前吧。现在我开始听说，设计也有点要交给一个人负责了。Host: Is this a new trend? one person because CTPO I started to hear about two years ago chief technology and product officer 2 three years ago and now I'm starting to hear design also going into one person a little bit.

Will Larson：我不知道这算不算一种趋势。我确实觉得，随着智能体逐渐走向主流，我看到的一个挑战是：你必须能够做出决策，而且要快速做出决策。我们该怎么做？哪些事不该做？智能体在产品领域的应用该如何推进？在设计领域又该如何推进？Will Larson: I don't know if it's a trend or not. I do think that for one challenge I've been seeing with like the like agents kind of getting more mainstream is you actually have to be able to make decisions and make them quickly and h how do we do things? How do we not do things? how does agent adoption work for product? How does it work for design?

嘿，如果设计团队没有使用云端设计、Figma MCP 之类的新工具，那他们确实就成了瓶颈。现在设计的责任归属该怎么划分呢？比如，Imprint 一直在尝试让开发人员主导设计的模式，用于一些次要功能。这确实解决了瓶颈问题，但也带来了很多摩擦，比如，当工程师主导设计、有时又没有遵循设计系统时，出现的设计缺口到底该由谁负责？Hey design if they aren't using the you know new tools like cloud design or the Figma MCP or whatnot then they're really the bottleneck. How do you kind of split the responsibility there on who owns design now? And so imprint for example has been experimenting with this developer-led design model for kind of second tier features and it's created a ton of friction like it's solved this bottleneck. It's also created a lot of like who's responsible for these design gaps that show up when engineers do lead design and sometimes like don't follow the design system properly.

因此，拥有一个统一的决策点，能够真正权衡这些取舍，我认为，在这个发生巨大变革的时刻，这很有力量。我内心深处确实相信，软件行业在软件创造方式上的变化，比我职业生涯中的任何时候都更大。你知道，我是 2008 年底入行的，从未见过这样的变化。我经历过的许多变化都比较微妙，或者更偏向文化、社会层面。如今我创造软件的方式，和甚至一年前相比都大不相同。在这个发生巨大变革的时刻，拥有一种集中的机制，我认为对我们确实很有帮助。不过，我个人并不认为这会成为一种长期趋势。但我也不确定。And so having a unified kind of point that can actually make these trade-offs I think this moment of like immense change I think is pretty powerful. I do think just in my core I believe the industry is changing more in terms of how we create software than it ever has in my career and you know I started in you know late 2008 I've never seen a change like this a lot of the changes I've seen were more subtle or more kind of cultural or social just how I create software is really different than it was even a year ago and having a centralized kind of mechanism during this moment of immense change I think has been really helpful for us but I don't personally think it's like a long-term trend But I don't know.

我现在尽量避免对太遥远的未来做预测。一切都在发生很大变化。I'm trying to avoid predictions about too deep in the future at this point. Everything's changing a lot.

工程管理的演变方式How engineering management has evolved

主持人：不过，我们不妨回到你刚入行的时候。能聊聊你所见证的软件工程领域的变化吗？我们就聚焦于你的经历。这里我们来谈谈硅谷的公司。我们知道它们处在一个泡沫之中，但这个泡沫很值得拿来讨论。从大概 2007 年左右到今天，软件开发和团队领导方式发生了哪些变化？Host: But why don't we go back to like from from when you started in the industry? Can we talk about the changes you've seen in software engineering? Let's just focus on your experience. So this to talk about the Silicon Valley companies. They we know they're a bubble, but they're useful bubble to talk about. How did building software change leading teams change over you know like starting from like what like 2007 all the way to today?

Will Larson：我不知道你最初作为工程师的经历是什么样的。我刚当工程师时，最开始是做承包商，22岁，在雅虎远程工作。团队里其他人都不是远程办公。后来我转成全职员工时，经理还是同一个。所以我两年里一直是同一位经理。两年间，我和那位经理进行过两次一对一谈话。Will Larson: I don't know what your first experience was like kind of as an engineer but when I was first an engineer first as a contractor I was like 22 for Yahoo working remotely. No one else on the team was remote. And then when I went full-time, I had the same manager. So I had the same manager for two years. I had two one-on- ones with that manager over two years.

主持人：我从来没有过一对一谈话，或者说一年一次的那种谈话，也没有绩效评估，甚至连绩效薪酬方面的沟通都没有。然后他们就会说：“嗯，干得不错。这是给你的加薪。”或者说：“哦，以前升职的时候，他们会说：‘恭喜，你升职了。’”重点好像只是：“嗯，你现在赚得更多了。不错。”Host: I had no one-on- ones or like once a year or for performance, not even performance for pay conversations. And then they would say, "Yeah, good job. Here's your raise." Or like, "Oh, and then promotions used to be like, "Congratulations, you're now promoted." And it was more about like, "Yeah, you're making more money. Cool."

Will Larson：而且我当时并不觉得自己会有两次以上谈话。第一次基本上是他想聊聊另一位员工的表现，试图弄清楚对方是不是表现不佳之类的。所以那不是要听我提什么反馈。第二次则是，哦，你说你要离职了，这是怎么回事，对吧？所以这也算是挺正常的。Will Larson: And I didn't have any expectation that I'd have more than than two. And the first one was basically he wanted to talk about another employees performance trying to get like some signal about whether they were doing poorly. So it wasn't like feedback from me or something. and the second one was like oh you like gave notice you're leaving like what's what's going on right? And so and that was just kind of normal.

所以，他的工作——按他的看法，我觉得他确实做得特别好——就是在公司里寻找一个机会，让团队能够产生影响。他会在公司里到处寻找我们可以做、而且真正有价值的事情，然后把它带回来；接下来我们的工作就是把它落实并让它运转起来。工作就是这样开展的。根本没有什么他在帮我获得一份有成就感的职业之类的想法；我觉得那对他来说无关紧要。And so his his job the way he saw it and I think he was like really good at it was his job was to go find an opportunity in the company for the team to have impact. So he was going around the company searching for something we could do that was really valuable and he kind of like brought that back and then our job was to implement it and make it work and that was just like how the work was done and there was no idea that he was like helping me have a rewarding career or something like that like I think was irrelevant to him.

主持人：我们基本上是在聊 200 之前的事。没错。Host: We're talking pre200 pretty much. Yep.

Will Larson：然后，当我开始深入了解时，我觉得所有经理基本上都被解雇了。后来我在 DIG 当上了经理，因为他们问我的时候，只有我傻到没有拒绝。不过你知道，那时候我最多也就有两年半到三年的工作经验。Will Larson: and then when I you know got to dig I think all the managers basically got fired. I actually became a manager at DIG because I was the only one dumb enough not to say no when they asked me but you know I had I had like two and a half three years of experience tops at that point

Will Larson：我对管理一窍不通，对吧？而且再说一次，我在之前那份工作里从来没跟经理打过交道。我会跟技术负责人沟通，确定技术方向；要是我搞砸了什么事，对方就会不高兴。但那基本上就是那里的全部领导模式了，对吧？所以我加入时就成了经理。但在 DIG，除了我在过去一年里做的那些事之外，真的没有什么管理可言，而我完全不知道自己在做什么。Will Larson: and I knew nothing about management right and again I never interacted with my manager at my prior job. I interacted with like a tech lead to kind of set technical direction and then got upset if I screwed something up. But that was kind of the entirety of like the leadership model there, right? So I came in and I was a manager. but I there was really no management at DIG other than you know me for the last year and I didn't know what I was doing whatsoever.

所以说，我在 Uber 学到了很多，但在 Uber 的时候，每个人都特别忙，那里也没有什么管理。真的是要么自己闯出来，要么就被淘汰；你要是没能摸索明白，你的团队就会非常吃力，因为如果决策没做对，周围快速扩张的规模就会直接压垮你的团队。所以说，真的真的没有任何支持。So really I learned a lot at Uber, but again at Uber everyone was so busy there was no management there either. It was really a sink or swim and either you figured it out or and your team really struggled because if you didn't get the decisions right the scale of the growth around you would just crush your team and so again like really really no no support.

挺有意思的，因为到 2017 年我当上经理时，Uber 刚好推出了第一个经理学徒项目，确实会让你和人交流。所以我在那里当上经理后，参加了几天的集体活动，还分配了导师之类的。大多数工程经理从来没有过这种经历。而且这在 Uber 还是全新的做法，他们把它弄得更正式了。说实话，他们确实做了一些内部自制培训。不过在那之前，什么都没有。哦，他们这么做是因为我觉得他们意识到，糟糕的经理正逐渐成为一个非常严重的问题。It was interesting because by 2017 when I became manager Uber put together its first apprentice manager program which actually talking with people. So when I became a manager there, I had like a few days of getting together, mentors assigned, all that. Most engineering managers never ever had that. And Uber, it was brand new at Uber. They made it more formal. So they actually did some internal DIY training, honestly. But yes, before that, nothing. Oh, and they did it cuz I think they realized that bad managers were becoming a really big problem.

Will Larson：是的，这说得通。我觉得当时大家都还在摸索。我觉得我待过的 Uber 非常……有点短视。比如，他们有个价值观——我可能记错了——大致就是“自己解决问题”。这并不是他们明文列出的一条价值观，但人们遇到问题时不会去找其他团队帮忙，而是自己解决。也许“让建设者专心建设”算是这一理念的某种变体。Will Larson: Yeah, which makes sense. I think people were just figuring it out. And I think the Uber I worked in was extremely kind of myopic. So one of the kind of like values I might get it wrong was basically solve it yourself. That's like not literally one of the stated values but people didn't go get blocked in other teams they just did it themselves and maybe let builders build might have been like a variant of this.

主持人：是的，有“让建设者去建设，做所有者而不是租客”这句话；把两者结合起来时，还提到了某种原则性的东西。不过，意思大概就是按自己的路子闯，别请求原谅，直接把事情做成。Host: Yeah there was the let builders build be an owner not a renter and when you combined the two there was something about principled thing but yeah it was like just roam your way and don't ask for forgive just get it done.

Will Larson：是的。而且当时有一种不依赖他人的文化，我觉得这特别能让人发挥主动性。比如你说：“啊，我卡住了。”别人就会说：“你没卡住，你得自己想办法解决。”Will Larson: Yep. And there was sort of like a no dependencies culture which I found really empowering where it's like oh I'm blocked it's like you're not blocked you need to go figure it out

Will Larson：有时候这真的很让人痛苦，但也确实意味着你总能承担起责任，自己想办法解决。有时候你知道，我记得我曾经给 Uber 中国签采购订单，当时我们找不到任何人来签，最后我签了一张金额高达数千万的采购订单。那时我大概才 27 岁吧，而且根本没人能批准，但事情必须办成。所以你知道，Tuckups 的负责人 Amir 和我就只是面面相觑，心想：我猜我们只能签了。我喜欢那个时期 Uber 的一点是，之后从来没人跟我提过这件事。就从来没有人再来跟进。Will Larson: and that was really painful sometimes but it really meant you could always take responsibility and just figure it out your yourself sometimes you know I remember signing like purchase orders for Uber China where we couldn't get anyone to sign it and I ended up signing like a multi-10 million purchase order and I was I was probably like 27 or there was no one to approve it and it had to get done. And so, you know, Amir, the head of Tuckups and I were just kind of staring at each other and was like, I guess we'll just sign it. And like the thing that I loved about Uber of that era is like no one ever talked to me about it. Like there was never like a follow-up.

可能也不太好。从公司治理的角度来看，这种探索可能有点临时拼凑的感觉，但我们确实没有妨碍彼此，而且能够做出很了不起的事情。Probably not good either. The search in a corporate governance perspective that's like maybe a little bit like ad hoc, but we really didn't get each other's way and we're able to do like amazing things.

而且这里本身也是一个极具挑战性的工作场所。Also extremely challenging place to work in its own right.

主持人：是的。人们离开、精疲力竭都是有原因的。很多人……Host: Yeah. People left and burned out for a reason. a lot of them

Will Larson：完全如此。不过说真的，我一路走来都是这样。后来到了 2016 年左右，我终于加入了 Stripe。众所周知，Stripe 当时也没有什么管理文化，所以我加入时，我记得公司里只有三位经理。其中一位是我特别喜欢共事的 Railene，我想她手下有 40 到 50 名直属下属，因为 Stripe 看过谷歌当年的那篇论文；谷歌曾有一段时间几乎没有经理。Will Larson: 100% but really so I all the way through then I finally get to stripe around 2016 and stripe sort of famously didn't have a management culture either so when I joined there were I think three managers one of them who I really loved working with Railene I think had somewhere between 40 and 50 direct reports because Stripe had read the like the paper from Google when they used to have basically no managers for some period of time

主持人：以及它是如何不起作用的Host: and how it didn't work

Will Larson：起初由管理者管理——不，他们起初遵循的是一种模式，在很长一段时间里都没有管理者。Will Larson: initially managed no they initially followed the model where they there were no managers for a long time.

Will Larson：所以我算是加入了那一波管理岗位扩张浪潮，成为其中比较早的一批经理之一。我想当时有三四位经理，有 Railene、Jorge，还有一两位其他人。Jorge 管着一支大概有30人的团队，而这30个人里，他下面可能只有一位经理。Railene 我想手下没有经理。那段时间也非常混乱。Will Larson: And so there I kind of joined in that the wave of managerization as like one of the early managers in that wave but I think there were three or four managers Railene Jorge or there were like one or two others. Jorge was managing a team of I think 30 with maybe no one one manager underneath him out of for those 30 folks. Railene I think had no managers. It was just like a very it was a very chaotic time as well.

不过话说回来，经历过 Uber 那段经历之后，我当时对混乱已经非常非常熟悉了。但与此同时，公司业务也在飞速增长。我觉得，Uber 那段时期确实是“管理者的角色是什么”这一文化转变开始逐渐确立的时候：管理者不再是核心执行者或决策者，而是开始真正扮演协调者的角色。看着这种变化发生，真的非常非常有意思。But again, kind of coming out of the Uber experience, I was very very familiar with chaos at that point. But also the business was growing really really fast. And so I think really that period at Uber though is when the cultural change around what is the role of manager I think started to like cement itself a little bit and kind of this role of manager not as kind of a core doer or a decision maker but as a facilitator really started to take hold and that was like pretty pretty fascinating to watch.

我写《Staff Engineer》的原因之一——我想这本书是在2021年出版的——实际上是为了收集我曾共事过的一些资深工程师的反馈，And one of the reasons why I wrote Staff Engineer, which I think came out in 2021, was actually like collecting feedback for some of the staff engineers I'd worked with,

Will Larson：因为当时有一个观点让我特别沮丧：Staff 工程师主要就是去做有趣、好玩、能让他们个人觉得有成就感的问题。但这根本不是我对 Staff 工程师的需求。我需要他们去处理业务问题和可扩展性问题。作为一名领导者——我离开 Stripe 时，我想说我的团队大概有 250、260 人左右——我面临着所有这些问题。所以我最优秀的一些工程师会说：“我想做更有意思的问题。”而我能提供的只有苦差事，但这些苦差事正是业务取得成功所必需的。那么，我该怎么让他们重新聚焦呢？我觉得当时他们中的许多人都认为，这违反了管理契约：我的目标和职责应该是给他们安排自己想做的、有趣的工作。Will Larson: because one of the ideas that I was really frustrated with at the at the time was this idea that staff engineers principally got to work on interesting, fun problems that they found personally rewarding, which wasn't what I needed for my staff engineers at all. like I needed them to go work on the business problems and the scalability problems that I as like a leader and when I left Stripe I want to say my team was like 250 260 something like that I had all these problems and so some of my very best engineers were like I want like a more interesting problem and it's like I only have suffering to offer but this suffering will make is what's going to make the business succeed and so how do I refocus them and I think many of them at the time felt like that was a vi violation of the management con contract like my goal and my obligation was to give them interesting work they wanted.

主持人：哦，回头看会发现，和大约十年前相比，变化真大，挺有意思的。Host: Oh, interesting how when we look back just how it changed from like 10 years before.

Will Larson：完全正确。所以我觉得那段时期挺有意思的，但我不认为那种观点真的正确过。看看 Stripe 的资深员工，再看看我工作过的其他地方，那些人做的都是公司真正需要、价值很高的工作。你从未见过这种观点真正在高管层站稳脚跟，但很多新加入的人确实抱有这种看法。我想，不点名的话，他们此前任职的某些公司在这方面的观念非常强烈：对于资深新员工，经理的职责之一就是给他们安排有趣的工作。我认为这一点上，整个行业确实已经彻底转向了。零利率是不是也和这有关？我们经常会回到这个话题，这很耐人寻味。我也写过这方面的内容：利率这种东西感觉如此抽象，我们有时也会听人提起它。Will Larson: Totally right. And so I think that was like a fascinating time to be in but I don't think that perspective was ever really right. If you look at the people who are really senior at Stripe, but also everywhere I've worked those folks were doing the really valuable work that the company needed. you never saw that perspective like really take hold in the executive ranks but a lot of the folks coming in really had that belief and I'd say like without naming names certain companies that they came from had very strong versions of that where kind of the obligation of the manager for senior hireers was to give them fun work and I think the industry's really reverted on that one for sure was this something to do with zero interest rates we often come back to this which is so curious I wrote about this as well how an interest rate which feels so abstract and we sometimes hear about it.

它很可能长期影响了科技领域的融资。how it probably impacted funding in tech for a very long time.

ZIRP 对科技行业的影响ZIRP’s impact on tech

可能是招聘方面的初创公司，那些获得了资金、也许却没有商业模式的初创公司，但它们还是拿到了融资。归根结底，这是软件工程师的典型模式、管理者类型、管理决策。然后，大约在2022年，音乐停了，效率变得更加重要。现在我们似乎又看到了这种情况。我想我们很多人都在问，我自己也在问：我们那段时间做的一切，在当时是正确的吗？probably hiring startups, startups that were funded that maybe didn't have a business model but they were still funded and ultimately software engineering archetypes manager types management decisions and then the music stopped sometime around 2022 where efficiency became more important and now we're kind of seeing this and now I think a lot of us are asking and I'm also asking myself the question like everything that we did during that time was it right at the time

Will Larson：你读过那篇吗？我可能会把他的名字说错，但我记得好像是 Ron John Royy 写的，类似《Zer explains everything》的那篇边缘博客文章。Will Larson: did you ever read I'm going to get his name wrong but I think it was like Ron John Royy's like Zer explains everything blog post from the margins.

主持人：是的，边际。我们也会附上链接。我很喜欢他的文字。是的。Host: Yes, the margin. We'll also link that. I love his writing. Yes.

威尔·拉森：嗯，我在 DIG 的一位同事，后来我把他招进了 Uber，他叫约翰·德克。他是《The Margins》的另一位作者，我想另一位是罗恩·约翰·安德罗伊。所以我读了那篇文章，确实很有共鸣，对吧？我确实认为，Zerp 解释了整个 2010 年代的变化：管理风格如何改变，薪资如何上涨，随后招聘竞争如何让招聘、谈妥录用并留住人才的能力，成为成功公司与不那么成功的公司之间的差异化因素，因为后者就是留不住优秀人才。这也在某种程度上把主导权交还给了工程师，营造出一种截然不同的环境。因此，公司推销自己的方式之一，就是宣称自己氛围更轻松、更关注员工，也更重视职业发展；我认为，这些做法往往会适得其反。Will Larson: Well, one of my colleagues at DIG, who then I hired at Uber was John Durk, who's the other writer on the margins along with I think it's Ron John Androy, but so I read that piece and it it really resonated, right? I do think that Zerp has explained the entire like 2010s in terms of how management styles changed, salaries went up, then competition for hiring became your ability to hire and close and retain became the differentiator between these like successful companies, the less successful because you simply couldn't retain great people. and that like pulled kind of leverage back into the engineers hands and created like a very different environment. And so part of the way companies were pitching themselves was like more relaxed, more focused on you, more career development, and I think in ways that I think were often like kind of self-defeating.

所以我觉得，人们对 Google 的福利文化有一种比较笼统的评判。我不认为除了 Google 和 Meta 之外，还有哪家公司做得特别出色，同时又有那种程度的福利导向。不过我确实觉得，撇开福利不谈，公司还有很多其他方式来专注于奖励性工作和有趣的工作。你知道，有些公司会说，哦，工程师也许不应该值班。值班这种事该由二线 SRE 来做。这很有意思，因为实际上，我共事过的每个人都知道，让负责这项工作的工程师值班，能让软件变得更好。YSo I think there's this kind of like broad judgment of like the Google Perk culture. And I don't think any company that did incredibly well other than maybe Google and Meta had a that level of perk orientation. But I do think ignoring the perks, there are many other ways that companies try to focus on rewarding work, interesting work. you know, companies like, oh, engineers maybe shouldn't be on call. That's for like the second tier SRE to be on call. And which was interesting because that was actually a place where every single person I've worked with knows engineers being on call for the work makes the software better. Y

Will Larson：然而，公司依然有点像是在说，哦，也许为了让大家过得更愉快，我们不该让大家为自己正在做的工作轮值待命，而是应该把告警派给那些没有参与软件开发的人。我认为，这种倾向确实揭示了这些公司的优先事项发生了转变。Will Larson: and yet companies were still kind of like, oh, maybe for the enjoyment of it, we should let folks not be on call for the work they're doing and instead page other people that aren't involved in the creation of the software. And that orientation really reveals I think that the shift in priorities in those companies.

主持人：嗯，我也在想，那是不是有段时间，管理者会因为团队流失率低而受到奖励——也就是说，团队里没什么人离职；同时还能招人来填补团队编制。因为以前经常有那么一段时间，这听起来可能很疯狂，但招满编制其实很难。比如说，假设你是总监或高级工程经理，手下有个30人的团队，今年给了你10个招聘名额。如果你没法把名额招满，也就是说，找不到合适的人来招进团队；而且这些岗位比如说都是高级职位及以上，所以你不能随便招几个应届毕业生来凑数，因为那样就太容易了。Host: Well, I also wonder if that was a time where managers were rewarded for having low attrition on team meaning few people left being able to hire on the team to fill headcount cuz often there was a time this might sound crazy but filling headcount was difficult. You were given let's say you had a team of 30 as a director or senior engine manager. you had 10 headcount this year and if you couldn't fill that meaning you couldn't hire the right people and this was like let's say senior and above so it was like you couldn't just get new grass cuz that would be too easy

威尔·拉森：那多少会对你有点不利。Will Larson: then it kind of counted a little against you

主持人：或者其他人会拿到那个团队编制，这可能有助于他们晋升，因为很明显，如果你手下有四十多个人，你可能就成了高级经理，也就是总监级别。所以，在这种环境中表现不错的经理，渐渐变得有点讨好别人；他们也开始保护、保护自己的工程师，不让他们接触业务。 我想知道，这种替工程师挡开业务的做法，是不是反而让很多人吃了亏？因为现在，作为工程师，人们越来越期待你对业务有敏锐的判断力，理解业务。这样你才会变得抢手；这样你到了初创公司或其他地方，才能迅速上手。我仍然会听到一些在这家大型公司——比如说某家大型可观测性公司，反正就是这类公司——工作过的人讲，他们去了初创公司，一家七人的初创公司，然后说那里糟透了，比如“他们不让我做事。”我就会说：“等等，你们公司才七个人。”Host: or someone else would get that headcount which might help their promotion because it was kind of obvious if you had 40 plus people you're now you might be senior manager that's your director title and so managers who did well in this environment became a bit of people pleasers and also they started to shield shield their engineers from the business for example and I wonder if the shielding from the business has bitten back a lot of people because now as engineers you're increasingly expected to be savy about the business understand a business that's when you're going to be in demand that's when in a startup or other places you get to hit hit the ground running and I still hear stories from people who worked at this big company the let's say a big observability company at any of them and they went to startup 7% startup and they say it's terrible like I'm they're not letting me do things And I'm like, "Hang on, you're a seven person company.

“比如说，情况怎么样？”而你是个有经验的人，怎么会不去问一家企业需要做些什么呢？咱们来做吧。好！而且他们已经在另一个地方待了一阵子了。Like, how is it?" And you're an experienced person. How is it that you're not asking what does a business need to do? Let's do it. Boom. And they've been socialized in a different place for a while.

Will Larson：是的。我觉得我觉得，这在激励机制方面占了很大一部分。我确实认为，围绕人员编制、招聘、团队管理，以及员工调查结果来开展工作，都是非常有价值的工具。Will Larson: Yeah. I think I think that is like a huge part of it in terms of the incentives. I do think the orientation around like headcount, filling, team kind of management, like the employee kind of survey results. These are really valuable tools.

我从这些调查中确实收获很多，但我记得在这些发展更快的公司里，我花了很多时间根据调查结果分析经理的管理水平。不过，调查结果是需要认真解读的：分数高或低，并不代表经理好或不好。还得结合具体情况追问其他问题，比如：“嘿，为什么你们团队对此都这么不满？”这并不意味着你就是个好经理或不是个好经理，对吧？I get like a lot out of them, but I remember spending a lot of time at these faster growing companies like analyzing the quality of manager based on the survey results. But survey results are like you have to really interpret them like high scores or low scores don't mean good or bad manager. There's like context to ask other questions about like hey why why is your team all upset about this? That doesn't mean you're a good manager or not, right?

我认为，这些在某种程度上成了它们自身的目标，而不是一种解释机制。你知道，在很多方面，这就像是在部署这些东西时采取了一种懒散的中层管理方式。And I think these became a little bit a goal of their own rather than an interpretation mechanism which you know in a lot of ways is just like lazy kind of middle management in terms of how these are deployed.

但我确实确实看到了这一点，而且我觉得，总的来说，我觉得我讨厌讨论人员编制；对吧？我觉得这几乎从来都不是最有意思的话题。但我认为，在一个不允许管理者做技术决策的世界里，他们真正能用来加快执行速度的唯一杠杆就是人员编制或优先级排序。哦，所以你的意思是，当时在 ZER，管理者们普遍遵循的观点是不要做技术决策，这迫使精明而聪明的管理者把更多精力放在非技术层面，可能因此对技术方面投入不足，也许只是没有做出本该做出的决策，并且过度关注软性事务；或者可能是在保护团队不受业务影响，诸如此类，因为他们把精力都放在了这些事情上。But I definitely definitely saw that and I think in general I think I hate headcount conversations and right I think they're they're almost never the most interesting conversation but I think in a world where managers are not allowed to make technology decisions the only lever they have to actually execute faster is headcount or prioritization. Oh, so are you saying that at that time during ZER where managers were the conventional wisdom was do not make technical decisions this forced sav and smart managers to put way more focus on the non-technical side potentially underinvesting in the technical things maybe just not making decisions that should have been done and overindexing on the soft side or maybe shielding their team from the business or all these things because they put their energy there.

哦，百分之百。我觉得这话非常对。比如，我现在跟合作的团队说得最多的一点就是，招聘是解决任何问题最无趣的办法。我们几乎应该永远都不要谈招聘。不过，反过来说，如果你有空缺编制，就会申请更多编制。我们也不该谈编制，因为真正重要的是招聘的吞吐量，而且你实际上也没法靠增加编制解决问题。但对，我觉得我们基本上就是告诉管理者，他们不能考虑技术方案，那他们还能怎么办？只能想流程方案了。Oh, 100 percent. I think that's very true. Like for most like what I tell my teams that I work with now is like the hiring is the least interesting way to solve every problem. Like we almost always should never talk about hiring. But the correlary to that is like if you have open headcount, you ask for more headcount. We shouldn't talk about headcount either cuz like what matters then is like the hiring throughput and you actually like can't use more headcount anyway. But yeah, I think we basically told managers they couldn't think about technology solutions and then what do they have? They have like process solutions.

职业发展阶梯Career ladders

他们要么负责排期，要么负责人员。因此，我确实认为，这是这两种角色分化之后自然而然的结果。这并不是说我们完全不该把它们分开，但我确实认为，我们需要有效的领导层来兼顾两者。否则，他们就会过度侧重招聘，这也导致了我们过去看到的许多臃肿组织。 我们来聊聊职业发展吧。先从个人贡献者说起：在你接触到的初创公司或中型公司里，软件工程师的职业机会发生了哪些变化？过去我们的职业晋升阶梯相当清晰：初级、中级、高级、资深工程师，晋升路径也很明确。现在，AI 工具已经出现了，它们在编写代码——这过去大概是工程师一级和二级的工作。如今它们在架构设计方面也越来越厉害。我们还在谈论循环。我们还需要职业晋升阶梯吗？如果你是一家公司的管理者，现在是不是应该担心如何制定一套职业晋升阶梯？they have scheduling or they have people and so I do think this was the natural consequence of the bifurcation of these two roles which isn't to say we shouldn't bifrocate at all but I do think we need effective leadership to have both or they overinker on kind of hiring and that drives a lot of the bloated orgs we saw in the past let's talk about careers career development let's start with individual contributors how do you think career opportunities are have changed for software engineers working at startup of midsize companies that you see because we used to have a pretty clear career ladder one two senior staff it was clear on how you get promoted to start with you know AI schools are out you know they're they're writing the code which used to be like nge1 and n2 they're now getting better at like architecture we're talking about loops do we have a career ladder should we have a career ladder if if you are a manager at a company should you be worried about putting together a career ladder right now

Will Larson：这是个好问题，对吧？我确实认为，团队肯定会期待我们建立职业发展阶梯，对吧？我认为，研究也支持这样一种观点：有评估标准，比没有评估标准更能促成公平的决策。所以我认为，以职业发展阶梯为基准的做法会一直存在。我也确实认为，如果没有这些，你就会低估某些事情，对吧？Will Larson: it's a good question right and I do think the expectation is certainly from the teams that we should have career ladders, right? And that is so the belief which I think is like backed up in research is that like having rubrics drives more fairer decisions than not having rubrics. And so I think this anchoring on career ladders is like something that's here to stay. And I do think if you don't have that then you do undervalue certain things, right?

所以，维护工作、胶水工作、凝胶工作，随你怎么称呼，我觉得这些工作都被低估了，而那些实际有效、光鲜亮眼的事情则被过分强调了。我觉得这肯定是事实。所以，我仍然相信职业晋升阶梯，对吧？我觉得它仍然有价值，但我认为其中应该包含什么，这件事很复杂，也远没有那么明确。And so maintenance work, glue work, gel work, whatever you want to call it, I think gets like underemphasized and flashy things that actually work get overemphasized. I think that's that's definitely true. So, I'm still a believer in career lading, right? I think it's still valuable, but what should be there, I think, is like complicated and I think it's like much less clear about what should be it.

我想我不知道是哪家咨询公司一直在卖这些职业晋升阶梯。你一家小公司一家小公司地看，就会发现它们用的职业晋升阶梯完全一样，像是从什么地方买来的某种模板包。所以我觉得这些东西都已经过时了，但我们还没有下一版。话虽如此，说到现在大家如何晋升到 Staff 或 Principal 级别，我真正关心的是，我一直在考虑为 Staff Engineer 职级设计一个补充方案。I think I don't know which consultancy has been selling some of these career ladders. You kind of small company by small company, you see the exact same career ladder from some like kind of like I don't know like packet you can buy somewhere. And so, I think all of those are just really outdated, but we don't have like the next version of it. That said, when I think about folks getting to like staff or principal these days, like what I really care about is I've been thinking about doing like an add-on to staff engineer.

我大概会在……我也不知道，未来十年里的某个时候再讲吧，但这其实关乎决策以及复杂情境。首先是这个应对模糊性的想法。我记得在 Stripe 时，我参与过一个想要实现多区域部署的项目。我不断听到那些试图主导这个项目的工程师说，我们需要产品团队决定跨区域复制该如何运作，或者说，如果我们只有一致性和可用性、却没有分区能力，产品应该支持什么样的行为。I'll get to it in like I don't know the next decade sometime, but it's really about decision-m and complicated situations. And so, first this idea of navigating ambiguity. And so at Stripe, I remember working on this project where we wanted to go multi-reion. And I kept getting from the engineers trying to lead it like we need product to decide how cross region replication works or what like what's the product behavior that we support if there is like a only the consistency and availability but no partitionability.

他们希望产品团队做出类似 CAP 定理中的那种权衡，但产品团队根本不可能做出这种权衡，对吧？而他们当时做的，是想方设法把自己困住了。其实，像你这样处于 Staff 或 Principal 级别的人应该做的，是通过做出一些权衡来应对模糊不清的问题，建立信心，并想办法做出一个原型，验证自己做出的假设是否有价值、是否可行。所以我认为，这些模糊不清的问题至今仍然很有挑战性，对我来说，它们甚至至今仍是一个很明显的标志。即使有了智能体，你仍然要做出这些复杂的权衡。They wanted the product team to make these like cap theorem trade-offs which the product team can't possibly make cap theorem trade-offs, right? And what they were doing is they were finding a way to get stuck when instead like what you need like someone at staff or principal level to do is to navigate an ambiguity by making some trade-offs, building conviction, figuring out how to like make a prototype that like tests like whether the predict the assumptions they made are valuable and workable or not. And so I think these ambiguous problems are still a really challenging one and to me like a strong marker even today. Even with agents, you still have these like complicated trade-offs that you have to make.

你提到的早点理解业务所涉及的一些权衡，不仅在于了解技术如何运作，还在于理解它对产品的影响。And some of the trade-offs to your point about kind of understanding the business earlier do come from not just understanding like how the technology works, but the product implications.

要理解产品层面的影响，你必须了解用户实际想做什么。你必须了解所提供产品的单位经济效益、提供服务的成本，以及实际收取的费用。因此，我认为要解决这些模糊的问题，你越来越需要拓宽思考范围。但我确实认为，决策一直是资深工程师和首席工程师发挥影响力的领域。And to understand product implications, you have to understand what your users are actually trying to do. You have to understand the unit economics of like the product that you're offering and the cost to service it and to actually what you're charging. And so increasingly I think you have to think be quite broad to actually work these ambiguous problems. But I do think decision-m has always been where staff and principal engineers have to make the impact.

而这一点完全没有改变。我其实不认为智能体特别擅长做这些权衡。我觉得它们常常甚至意识不到这些权衡的存在，因为这些内容不在上下文窗口里，而是一些相当微妙、隐含的东西，存在于软件之外。NGE12 的职业发展呢？And that hasn't changed at all. I don't actually think agents are exceptionally good at making these trade-offs. I think the agents often don't even recognize the trade-offs because they're not in the context window. kind of subtle implicit things that live kind of outside of the software. What about NGE12 careers?

Eng 1 对比 Eng 2Eng 1 vs Eng 2

我最近有位资深工程师问我：“你知道，AI显然已经能像初级工程师一样写代码了，因为我们很多时候对他们的期待就是这样。”接着他又说，AI总有一天会达到资深工程师的水平，但现在还没到。不过我仍然记得这件事，因为他说的显然有道理。那你怎么看 NG1/2 级的应届毕业生，或者级别低于资深工程师的人？他们还没有经历过那些磨砺，也缺乏足够的专业知识和判断力，所以无论是在招聘还是培养他们时，我们都还不能完全信任他们。I just had a senior engineer ask me saying so you know like AI clearly has gotten as good as an angel engine writing code because that's what we expected a lot of times from them and then this person was saying that well some point it'll come to senior but it's not there right now but I still remember this one cuz obviously there's truth to it but I in your or how do you think of Nge12 new grad or people who are under the senior they don't yet have the battle scars or the expertise or the judgment that you can fully trust them both in terms of hiring but also developing them.

我会尽量避免的一件事，是我所说的那种人为的、过于具体的划分。比如，Eng 1 和 Eng 2 有什么区别？我觉得，要把它说得特别具体其实挺难的。Will Larson: So one of the things I try to stay away from is I call like artificial like specificity and so like what's the difference between an edge one and nge two and you know I think it's like actually pretty hard to be like super concrete about it.

我觉得很多公司会很成功地把这种差异说成大约三年的工作经验，然后他们会问，这公平吗？我也不知道有没有什么特别公平的办法来评估 NGE1 和 NGE2。再说，特别差的 NGE1 肯定能看出来，但也有特别优秀的 NGE1；而 NGE2 往往只是随着时间推移、在岗位上积累更多背景经验。不过这并不是说他们特别明确地能做什么、不能做什么，尤其是有了那些编码工具之后——他们什么都能做，但要判断自己是否应该这么做，却越来越难了。而且在不合适的情境下，如果我们给了太多指示，很多时候你甚至根本看不出他们的判断力，对吧？所以实际上，我越来越不在意这些事情了。我觉得像工作年限、职级这类比较笼统的指标，对很多情况来说大概就够用了。我确实担心，把这些标准规定得极其详尽，会有点像一种虚假的胜利：看起来好像变得非常精准了，但我参加过一些校准会议，里面总有人专门迎合评分标准。I think a lot of companies successfully say the difference is like three years of work experience and they say is that is that equitable and like I don't know if there's any like super equitable way to evaluate nge ones versus nge two and again a really bad nge one you can identify but there was like a really good nge one and nge2 often is time and role in terms of just like building more kind of context over time but it's not like super like they can do this or can't do this especially with you know the coding harnesses like they do anything but actually deciding whether they should be doing it increasingly increasingly tricky and in the wrong situation we're getting a lot of direction you can't even perceive their judgment in a lot of cases right so I actually like care less and less about some of these things where I think just general things like time and level stuff like that is probably good enough for a lot of these I do worry that getting incredibly detailed on these criteria is like a bit of a like a fake like victory where it's like oh it's made it really precise but often I you've been in like calibration meetings where there people who play to the rubric.

我记得我以前在一家公司工作时，升到 Staff 级别好像有一项导师指导的要求。于是有人真的会主动去找人聊，然后把对方登记成自己的学员，就像是在收集学员一样。后来你再跟那个人聊起这件事，对方会说：“我都不知道为什么要跟你聊天，你就只跟我聊过一次。”所以，这就是所谓的“你衡量什么，就会得到什么”。我确实觉得，晋升一直都需要很多判断。每当你试图消除这些判断时，我其实不认为结果会更好。所以，我觉得用评估标准来帮助引导大家是有用的。I remember at one company I worked at we had to get to like staff there was like a mentoring requirement and so we'd have people that literally went out and like would talk to someone and then be like report them as like a mentee and they were like collecting mentees and then you talk to that person like I didn't know why I was talking to them. they just talked to me once and so like this is where if you actually create like the you know like you get what you measure. So I really think for promotions there's always been a lot of judgment. Whenever you try to remove the judgment I actually don't think you get good outcomes there either. And so having the rubric to help guide people I think that's useful.

但说到底，这还是相当主观的。我觉得，对于其中很多事情来说，设置一些限制条件，其实比制定一套非常全面、用于作出判断的标准更有意思。But ultimately it's like pretty subjective. And for a lot of these things I think it actually having kind of constraints is more interesting than having really comprehensive rubrics that are used to make judgments.

所以，这里有个例子。比如我在 Carta 做过的一件事。嗯，Carta 面临着很大的成本压力。所谓成本压力，就是要降低成本，或者说，更重要的是管理成本。没错。So here here's an example. So something I did at Carta. Well at Carta there's a lot of cost pressure. cost pressure meaning that like to reduce costs of the let's say or import manage costs exactly

Will Larson：所以，实际上我设定了一个比例上限：相对于总人数，Staff 工程师不能超过某个数量。你不可能突破这个比例，这让很多人非常恼火，对吧？但我认为，这其实更诚实地反映了大约 15 年前这个行业的情况。那时候，我觉得大多数公司里，最高的职级就是高级工程师。对几乎所有公司来说，高级工程师确实就是终点。后来，随着人们在职业生涯中不断前进，也有了更多拥有 20 年、30 年甚至 40 年软件经验的人，公司便增设了更多层级。但说到底，很多这样的层级更像是按资历和岗位划分的头衔，而不是代表从业者能力发生了明确、显而易见的变化。Will Larson: and so I actually had like a ratio can't have more than this number of staff engineers relative to the number and there just you was not possible to exceed that ratio that was very annoying to a lot of folks right but I think it actually is more honest where the industry was like 15 years ago 15 years ago I think there wasn't a role past senior in most companies like senior really was the ultimate role for almost every company. And so, you know, as people have gotten like further along in their careers and we have more people with like 20, 30, 40 years of software experience, they have opened up more of these levels. But like a lot of these levels are like ultimately more like time and roll kind of titles rather than like really like a definitive like obvious like change in the capabilities, the individuals that are that are doing it.

我尽量不太纠结细节。我确实觉得，设定一个明确的区块，比如一个、或者一到八个之类的，如果你想做的是控制成本，那会很有帮助，因为控制成本的时候，你必须坦诚地承认自己就是在控制成本。在 Carter 的时候，我们大概就是这种情况。而现在在 Imprint，我们不是在试图控制成本，而是在追求速度和质量。I try not to worry quite as much about like the details. And I do think having like a hard block of like one or one to eight or whatever it is really helpful if like what you're trying to do is manage costs because when you're managing costs, what you have to be honest about is that you're managing costs. And so at Carter, that was kind of the situation we're in. Now at Imprint, like we're not trying to manage costs, we're trying to manage velocity and quality level.

所以我们完全没有考虑过这一点。但我认为，领导力的一部分就是知道自己在做什么，解释自己是怎么做的，然后让大家接受由此带来的后果。因为 Carta 的缘故，我们需要维持一个固定比例。这意味着我们必须开始调整招聘方向，减少资深职位的招聘。And so we haven't thought about that at all. But this is where I think part of leadership is knowing what you're doing, explaining how you're doing it, and then letting people like accept the consequences of that. And so because of Carta, we were going to have like a fixed ratio. That meant we had to start shifting hiring to be less senior.

这样一来，我们实际上就能有更多人才源源不断地加入，填补那些层级。这个改进带来了很多东西，而且效果确实非常好。但如果我们只是尝试解决这个问题，却没有弄清楚招聘漏斗前端的其他环节，那肯定行不通。不过我也说不好。比起职业生涯早期，我现在没那么相信能把事情描述得滴水不漏、句句属实了。毕竟任何事情都有太多例外。So we could actually have more of a pipeline of folks coming in and filling those levels. From that fix, a lot of things came from it and which worked which worked really well. But it wasn't if we had just tried to fix it without figuring out the other parts of the hiring earlier in the funnel wouldn't have worked. But I don't know. I'm less of a believer in kind of like a perfect description of things that are true than I was earlier in my career. Just so many exceptions to everything.

关于标准和预期，以前的情况是——你知道，我们俩都在 Uber 工作的时候，后来你去了 Stripe——大家对这个岗位的要求都相当清楚。至于职级，我同意，一级、二级和高级工程师的界限可能比较模糊，但在某个阶段，对高级工程师的预期还是很明确的：通常来说，你可以信任他们。如果他们手下有初级工程师，他们会指导这些人。我觉得整个行业大概在近十年前就逐渐形成了这样的共识：你可以把一个项目交给高级工程师；对于 Staff 级工程师，你可以信任他们来确定一个团队或多个项目的方向，诸如此类。至于 N1 和 N2，他们能把代码写好，执行任务时不会遇到太多问题，也能接受反馈。他们有点像学徒级别。我觉得 N1、N2 级别并不算什么重大的晋升；它们不是终点，只是成长过程中的阶段。有些公司甚至像你们那样，要求员工必须成长到一定级别，但说实话，他们更像学徒，只是在逐渐培养良好的判断力等等。现在我们都越来越多地使用 AI 工具链，包括用它们来做代码审查，代码……The thing with like the rubrics and with expectations like it used to be you know when both of us worked at Uber you later worked at stripe it was pretty well understood what was expected of the role and you know with the levels like yes I agree that one two senior these can be murky but there was a pretty clear expectation at some point for example a senior you could trust them typically I think the ind industry started to understand at some point for like closer to a decade a senior could trust them with a project if they had junior engineers they would mentor them a staff you could trust them with to set the direction of a unit or multiple projects and so on and the nge one and n2s they could execute well coding without too many issues took feedback they were kind of like almost like they were like apprentice levels like I think nons2 it wasn't a serious promotion in terms of it was just it wasn't a destination it was just they're growing some companies even had the expectation as you were that you need to grow to certain level but they were like almost like apprentice honestly like they were just kind of getting getting to that to have good judgment and all these Now that we're all using AI harnesses a lot more, including for reviews, code

软件工程岗位如何变化How software engineering roles are changing

代码审查也在慢慢减少。我们现在做得比以前少了，以前我们会写代码，也会彼此给出非常直观的反馈。你会如何定义软件工程师这个角色？它和以前有什么不同吗？它是不是变得更有野心了？你是怎么理解的？因为它确实在变化。我觉得它好像不知怎么变得更有野心了，但我不确定自己能不能准确说清楚具体是怎么回事，尤其是从 CTO 的角度来看。reviews are slowly going away as well. We're doing a less of the what we used to do, which is coding and the very visible feedback between each other. How would you define what the role of a software engineer is? And is it different from before? Is it more ambitious? Is it how do you think about it? Because it is it is changing. like I feel it's getting more ambitious somehow, but I'm not sure I'm able to put my finger on exactly how, especially from a CTO perspective.

Will Larson：这是指一般的职位，还是三级职位之类的？Will Larson: And is this like the general role or is this like the level three or

主持人：不，这说的是一般的软件工程师岗位。我这么说是因为我觉得每个岗位都发生了很大变化。也许在中型及以上规模的公司里，资深工程师这个岗位过去并不会写太多代码，因为他们忙着确保我们做的是正确的事。所以现在可能很难区分，因为如今没人写太多代码了；即便是最小的团队，他们也得决定我们做的事情对不对、我做得对不对。首先，我觉得我们在这方面还处于非常早期的阶段。你肯定会和一些人聊，他们会说：“嘿，未来的软件团队不管公司规模多大，都只有五个人。”也许吧，也许我们总有一天会发展到那一步，但现在肯定还没到，而且我……Host: No, this is the general software engineering role. How because I think I feel each role has changed a lot. Maybe the staff role the staff engineers never did too much writing code at like midsize and above companies because they were busy making sure we're building the right thing. So maybe it's hard to separate because now no one is writing too much code and even the smallest rules they will have they will need to decide are we doing the right thing am I doing it right first I think we're so like early days in terms of where we're going and there's certainly people you're going to talk to they're like hey like the software teams of the future are five people for any size company and maybe maybe that's true maybe we'll get there at some point we're definitely not there right now and I

Will Larson：我不知道我们是否很快就能做到这一点。Will Larson: I don't know if we're going to get there soon

Will Larson：不过，确实有些公司只有少数工程师，却能在高效工作中消耗惊人数量的 token，这确实挺让人惊叹的。软件的角色会走向何方？我想我们很快就会知道。其实，这也正是现在这个行业特别有趣的原因：我觉得，我们这个职业正在经历比我入行以来见过的任何变化都更为剧烈的转变。对我来说，作为一个始终非常关注自己工作成果的人，这段时间是我经历过的最有趣的时光。不过，我也和一些人聊过，他们的快乐基本上来自进入心流、全神贯注地投入其中。Will Larson: but there certainly are companies that are you have a small number of engineers spending just a staggering number of tokens in productive whis and that's like a pretty a pretty cool thing to see where is the role of software going I think we're going to find out and this is actually why it's such a fun time to be in the industry right now right the most fun thing is like I think our profession is changing in a much more extreme way than anything I've seen since I entered the industry and for me like someone who's always been very oriented around the outcomes of the work I'm doing. It's just been like the most fun time I've I've had. But I've also spoken to folks who got basically joy from, you know, being in the zone, being in that flow state.

而且他们好像已经不再热爱软件了，因为他们喜欢的其实是亲手做软件这门艺术。And they like have fallen out of love with software because what they loved was like the actual art of doing it.

而对他们来说，你知道，有那么几个人，比如我最近聊过的一个人，他其实要退休了。他说：“我就是不再喜欢写软件了。”And for them, like you know, a few folks like one person I've spoken with recently, he actually he's retiring. He's like, I just don't enjoy writing software anymore.

Will Larson：而且他失去了这种心流状态。他会说，我的效率是提高了，但就是不喜欢这样。所以我觉得这个角色正在转变，而且这种转变非常有意思。对我来说，我一直有这样一种想法：软件的实际实现时间正趋近于零。但这些系统在很多方面仍然很慢。比如说，即便你能瞬间实现某些东西，你仍然得做出所有这些决策；它还是会有各种问题；在很多方面，它的扩展性依然很差；它依然会违背用户的预期；而且用户层面的单位经济效益仍然不对，根本无法成为一家盈利的企业。Will Larson: And he's lost this flow state. he's like I'm more productive but like they just don't enjoy it and so I think the role is shifting but I think it's shifting in a really interesting way and I to me I've had this kind of idea of software that the time to actually implement is approaching zero these systems are still very slow in terms of like you know okay let's say you can instantly implement stuff you still have to make all these decisions it still doesn't work in all these ways it's still it's going to scale poorly in all these ways still going to break the user expectation still going to have like the wrong user unit economics to actually be like a profitable business.

所以我确实认为，即使编写软件真的完全免费，还是会非常、非常、非常困难。And so I do think even if software were like literally free to write, it's still really really really hard.

所以，就像今天你会看到的，如果软件变得免费，那么工程师就会突然跑到产品团队的 PRD 前面，也跑到设计团队的高保真原型前面，这给那些试图与这种工程模式协作的设计团队带来了大量问题。坦白说，这也是我们在 Imprint 仍在努力摸索的事情，对吧？当然，这也可能创造一些机会：比如说，如果工程师也戴上设计的帽子，或者业务领域的帽子，然后全力开展一项实验——显然，这时候你会发现，为了不让客户感到困惑，你能开展的实验终究有限。这又回到了策略：必须有人说“不”。还有，你要和谁一起打造产品？如果是面向大众，他们的注意力总量是有限的。比如 Netflix，我不知道他们会推出多少部新电影，但我知道我打开 Netflix 时，他们不会把我淹没——我是说，他们确实会，但他们不会把全部 8,000 部电影都展示给我；他们会想办法筛选。所以我在想，如果软件变得更快，那么作为工程师，我们就需要发现业务其他环节的约束：领域、客户、现实情况，就像你说的单位经济效益，也就是如何赚钱。And so like today you'll see this like if software's free then all of a sudden engineers are running ahead of the PRDS from product and running ahead from the high fidelity mocks from design and that's creating a ton of issues for design teams trying to work with this engineering model and something we're still trying to figure out at imprint to totally honestly right that also could create opportunities where like well if if an engineer also puts on a design hat or a or a business domain hat and now and now like runs an experiment experiment full on to and obviously now you get to like there's only so many experiments you can run without confusing you customers which now it goes back to strategy someone having to say no and also like who are you building with like if it's for people like they will have the neat number of attention like Netflix has I don't know how many new movies they bring out but I know that when I open Netflix they don't overload me I mean they do but they have they have they don't show me all 8,000 movies they figure it out and so I wonder if If software is becoming faster like as engineers we will need to discover the constraints of the other parts of the business the domain the customers the reality like you say unit economics how money can be made

Will Larson：我觉得我在 Carta 工作时经常想到一件事：Carta 是一家规模不大的企业，我的意思是，不会有每秒几十万的请求涌入，也没有什么大规模的基础设施问题，但它的业务细节极其繁复。股权结构表的运作方式真的、真的、真的非常具体。对。Will Larson: I think something I thought about a lot working at Carta so Carta is a lowcale business by which I mean there's not like hundreds of thousands of requests per second coming in there's no like massive infrastructure problems there but it's an incredibly detailed business. How cap tables work is really, really, really specific. Yeah.

Will Larson：而且它非常复杂，例外情况也很多。然后再做……Will Larson: And it's very complicated and there are tons of exceptions. And then doing

主持人：这很重要，对吧？这只是件小事，但你得把它做好。Host: it's important, right? It's a little thing, but you need to get that right.

Will Larson：从可审计性的角度来看，准确性确实非常重要。你合作的律所也都有非常明确的观点，认为每件事都应该以非常具体的方式来处理。你可能还会遇到两位创始人之间的法律纠纷，他们争论实际归属的股权到底有多少，诸如此类。类似地，Carter 涉足的其他业务，比如基金管理，也都极其注重细节。因此，很多行业一直以来最难的部分都是领域背景知识。对我来说还不太清楚的是，那些真正难在领域背景知识上的企业，是否已经从各种 AI 工具中获益良多。Will Larson: Accuracy is really important from like an audibility perspective. you're also working with law firms that have like a real strong point of view about how everything should be done very particularly as well. And you could be in a legal battle between two founders who are arguing about how much equity was actually vested or something like that. similarly, the other businesses Carter went into like the fund administration also incredibly detail- oriented. And so there are a lot of businesses out there where the domain context has always been the hard thing. And it's not super clear to me if businesses where the domain context is really the hard part have benefited that much yet from kind of all the AI tools.

由于涉及各种细节、法律法规，以及与律所的合作关系（比如培训律所里的律师助理），股权结构表管理仍然非常困难。It's still incredibly hard to do cap table management because of the details, the laws, the relationships with the law firms in terms of training like the parallegals there.

我觉得，像这些零零碎碎的东西，让我认为在如今这个时代，领域复杂的企业仍然有很强的护城河。我不知道这种情况会怎么变化，但我觉得它会变。每隔两到三年，就会出现这么一种说法——产品工程师成了新一代王者，产品工程师成了新的超级英雄——类似这样的梗。现在轮到 AI 工程师了。There's like all these little pieces that I think domain like complex domain businesses still have like a lot of defensibility in this day and age. And I don't know if that's how that's going to change. I think it will change. Every two to three years there's this kind of like the product engineers are the new king. Product engineers are the new superhero kind of like meme that comes around. Now it's the AI engineer.

Will Larson：现在真正像产品工程师的是 AI 工程师，他们会使用 AI 技术，对吧？所以问题是……Will Larson: Now it's the AI engineer who really are like product engineers that use like AI techniques, right? And so the question is

主持人：这基本上就是如今几乎每位产品工程师的写照。Host: which is pretty much every product engineer these days.

Will Larson：完全正确。对。所以这说法其实并不明确。我的意思是，我一直没太弄明白“AI 工程师”到底是什么意思。Will Larson: 100%. Right. So it's like it's unclear. I mean I've never really quite understood what AI engineer means.

我觉得它的意思是，使用各种 harness、又想拿很高报酬的人。不过它可能也有别的意思，只是我没太注意到其中的细微差别。但你真的能让每个人都把所有这些背景信息记在脑子里吗？所以直到今天，你知道，人们以前常说，比如既是优秀设计师的前端工程师，或者能真正写出可用于生产环境的前端代码的设计师。I think it means someone who uses harnesses and wants to get paid a lot of compensation is I think what it means. But it probably means something else too that I've just sort of missed the nuances on. But like can you actually get individuals to hold all this context in their head? And so even today, you know, people used to talk about like the front-end engineer who's actually a good designer or the designer who could actually write production front end code.

那种人一直都很稀少。现在，稍微有点品味的设计师也能写生产代码了，对吧？反过来，有良好设计品味的前端工程师也能做设计。为什么我们还没看到更多这样的人呢？That person's always been rare. And now a designer with like a little bit of taste can write production code, right? And vice versa, a front engineer with like good design taste can do design. Why aren't we seeing more of that yet?

所以我觉得那算是一种社会约束。And so I think that's like a social constraint.

主持人：嗯，这是个特别好的问题，因为我也在问同样的事。我看到 Linear 的一些数据显示，设计师和产品经理提交的 PR 增加了，我当时就想，哦，确实有人给我发过这事。一位同行工程经理说：“等等，我一直在四处打听——我们应该能看到更多设计师把代码推送到生产环境，对吧？”我问了大约 10 家公司，又打听了另外 10 家，包括 Linear、Ramp、OpenAI 这样的公司。除了少数特别罕见的边缘案例，我还没听说过设计师把代码推送到生产环境的例子——我只听说过一个。设计师会发现 bug，会把它们找出来，但他们还是会让工程师参与进来，由工程师确认这种做法在代码库中可行。Host: Well, it's a really good question because I was asking the same thing. I saw some data from linear showing that PRs for designers and product managers are up and I was like oh actually some someone messaged this to me a fellow engineering manager said like hang on I've been asking around like we should be seeing more designers push to production right or product managers asked around 10 companies I asked around another 10 including the likes of linear ramp openai I have yet to hear except for like some exotic edge cases or like I Just one example of designers pushing production code. They will find bugs. They will identify them, but they will still get an engineer involved who confirms this approach works in the codebase.

尤其是在我们讨论原型设计以外的场景时。Especially when we're talking about outside of prototyping.

他们确实会做更多原型。但即便如此，我们也还没到那一步。我在想这是不是责任归属的问题。就是，你知道，比如说，虽然我会换灯泡，但家里需要做点更复杂的事情时，我还是会叫电工，因为那涉及电，对吧？我也可以看书。我在想是这个原因，还是专业化的问题。我不知道。They do prototype more. But even we're not there. It's I wonder if it's an accountability thing. It's on, you know, like when even though like I can change a light bulb, I will still call the electrician when I need to do something a bit more on my house because it's electricity, right? And I can read the books. I wonder if it's this or specialization. I don't know.

Will Larson：你知道，我一直在想的一件事是，现在有一种观点认为，如果你有一套很棒的设计系统，而且真的用过它，就不再需要产品设计师了。有些人确实持这种看法。不过我发现事实并非如此。即使有一套不错的设计系统，弄清楚这些不同组件如何组合在一起、设计系统里还缺少哪些组件、不同界面之间出现取舍时该如何应对，以及在呈现统一用户体验的同时如何管理这些取舍，这些事情依然很难。所以你知道，我明白《Attention Is All You Need》其实完全不是在讲人类的注意力。Will Larson: You know, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is like there's there's one worldview right now which is like if you have a great design system and you've actually used that design system, you don't need product designers anymore. That's like a viewpoint that a few people have. I haven't found that to be true though. even with a good design system, understanding how all these different components fit together, understanding the missing components in your design system, figuring out when you have like trade-offs across different screens, how you manage those trade-offs while presenting like the unified experience for the user, these are still really hard things to do. And so, you know, I know attention is all you need is actually not about human attention a at all.

但我确实觉得，在某种程度上，人们的注意力仍然有限；优秀的设计师、优秀的产品设计师，以及优秀的设计系统设计师，都受限于他们需要投入大量精力、把手头的细节做好，所以也就没多少时间去拓展其他领域。But I do think there's some dimension where like people are still constrained on attention and great designers and great product designers and great design system designers as well are all so constrained on like the details of what they're doing to do it well that they just don't have a ton of time to also be branching out.

这必然是事实吗？我不认为这是必然的。我确实认为，理论上，如果你有一套很棒的设计系统，保持了高度一致性，而且有大量 lint 规则来规定必须以特定方式使用它，那么设计系统团队和产品设计师就可以更积极地关注那些例外情况。就 Imprint 而言，我们正努力朝这个方向发展：常规情况由工程团队使用现成的设计系统来完成，而产品设计师则更多地与设计系统团队合作，处理那些非常复杂的变体，并扩展设计系统。It does that inherently have to be true? I don't think it's inherently has to be true. And I do think in theory if you have a great design system and you have a ton of consistency and a ton of llinters in terms of like it has to be used this way all of a sudden your design system folks your product designers could be just looking at the exceptions much more aggressively. That is where we're trying to get to at imprint for what it's worth where the base case is just done by engineering using the stock design system and product design is more working on the really complicated kind of versions of it along with extending the design system of the design system folks.

不过目前还没法这么做，还是有点棘手。但你知道，就像那些深耕 AI 的人常说的，我多少觉得这算是所谓的“技能问题”，我们最终会克服它的。It's not working that way yet though like it's still it's still a little bit tricky but you know as as like the folks deep in AI say like I kind of do assume this is like a quote unquote skill issue and that we will like get to the other side of it.

不过我觉得，这对我们来说仍然是个技能问题。我们还在摸索。But I it's still a skill issue for us. We're still figuring that out.

修订后的工程领导力规则Revised rules of engineering leadership

主持人：与此相关的一件事是，你写了修订版的工程管理原则。这篇文章非常棒，我们会把链接放在下面的节目说明里。在我想重点谈的一条原则中，你说：“我们要打造持久、主人翁意识强的团队。”我引用一下你的话：“持久、主人翁意识强的团队。”所以，领域背景知识就更加重要了。Uber 教会我的一条重要经验是，持久稳定的团队能创造奇迹：他们不断积累领域背景知识，培养团队情谊；随着持续深耕某个领域，他们也会逐渐增强对该领域的主人翁意识。这话是你在 Uber 时说的，大概是 2014 年、2015 年的事，也就是十多年前了。你现在是说，你觉得这依然非常适用，对吧？Host: One thing related to this is you wrote revised rules of engineering management. A really nice article. We'll link it in the show notes below. In one of the rules that I want to highlight, you say we wrote durable high ownership teams. I'm quoting you. Durable high ownership teams. So domain context are even more important. One of my biggest lessons at Uber was that persistent durable teams work magic by accumulating domain context building a sense of camaraderie and feeling increasingly strong sense of ownership over an area as they continue to work on it. Now this was from Uber like what like 2014 15 so like more than 10 years ago and you're saying that you feel this is very relevant right

Will Larson：我认为这是构建可扩展组织的唯一方式。有意思的是，我觉得这看起来似乎显而易见，但实际上算是一种不太符合主流共识的观点。很多时候，你在一家公司，比如有50名工程师，而你们有个对合作伙伴非常重要的项目，这个项目却延期了。这时候，《人月神话》所说的情况又出现了：他们会说：“嘿，再调15个人来做这个关键项目。”你知道，我想说《人月神话》大概是80、84年写的。Will Larson: I think this is the only way to build scalable organizations and it's interesting though I think this is this seems kind of like obvious but it's actually a bit of like a non-conensus take if you will and so a lot of times you're at a company say there's 50 engineers and you have a really important project for a partner that project's late there's still the mythical man month thing they're like hey we're moving 15 more people to work on this key project. And you know, the mythical man month I want to say was written in like 80 84

主机：7575，第二个版本是95Host: 7575 and the second version 95

Will Larson：而且那是……那是很久以前的事了。所以……Will Larson: and it's that's a while ago. and so

主持人：超过 50 年Host: more than 50 years

Will Larson：我们知道这行不通，所以首先，人们做这类事情，很多时候都是为了做做样子，营造出已经尽了一切可能的印象。Will Larson: we know this doesn't work and so like first like when people do things like this a lot of it's like optics and creating the perception of doing everything possible.

主持人：是的。Host: Yes.

Will Larson：这样一来，如果你没做到，就不是你的错。但实际上，这不仅行不通，还会破坏真正有效的做法：组建能够负责各自领域的小团队。所以我加入 Stripe 时，接手了 Jorge 当时带领的那支团队；我记得他后来去了公司另一个部门，负责领导 Connect。那时我手下有 30 个人，其中一位经理管理着大约四五个人。Will Larson: So that when you miss it's not it's not your fault. But actually, not only does does it not work, it also destroys the thing that does work, which is creating little pods that are able to own areas. And so when I joined Stripe, I had, you know, I took over kind of the team Jorge was leading at the time and he moved on to a different part of the company, I think, to lead connect. And so I had 30 people and one manager was managing like four or five of them.

然后我直接管理大概 23、24 个人。我做的第一件事就是想：好，我们可以分成哪些小组？接着我找出一些可以整合在一起的领域，让不同小组负责各自的领域。等我看到进展之后，就完全不再操心他们，直到出了大问题才会去管，这样我就能专注于对我来说更重要的事情，比如那些你们解决不了的问题。这种做法非常有效。所以我在 Uber 也这么做了，加入 Imprint 时也这么做了。在 Commcard 也是一样，不过我加入时，那已经是一个组织架构相当成熟、规模也很大的公司了，所以我不需要在那里做同样的事。And then I was directly managing say like 23 24 people. the first thing I did was like, all right, what are some pods? and figured out like some areas I could put together who could own areas and then once I saw some progress I just stopped thinking about them entirely till something went really wrong so I could focus on the bigger priorities for me which is like the problems you couldn't solve this works so well and so at Uber did the same thing when I came into imprint did the same thing as well same at comm card was like a really well kind of scaled organization by the time I joined it so I didn't didn't need to do the same there.

我觉得这真的特别有效。我认为，只要这件事做得好，人们实际做出的工作会比你自上而下发号施令时更好，因为他们对事情理解得非常透彻，而且这能让你把注意力真正放在公司最能撬动成效、或最棘手的部分上。所以，是的，我觉得这是个奇特的、与主流共识相悖的观点，但它真的特别有效，只不过从表面上看，它几乎总是显得不对劲。这也是它很难推行的原因之一：比如你有个合作伙伴发布项目，然后你说：“嘿，我不会调动这些人……”I think this just works incredibly well. I think if you do this well that people actually do better work than you will from top down dictation simply because they understand it really well and it gives you the ability to actually put your attention on the highest leverage or most painful parts of the company. And so yeah, I think this is a strange non-conensus take, but it just works incredibly well, but optically it almost always looks wrong. And that's like one of the reasons it's hard to do where you have like a partner launch and you're like, "Hey, I'm not going to move these folks.

我会让他们继续做手头的事情。这真的很重要。至于处在关键路径上的团队，我们会一起拼尽全力。不过，我们会拼命推进，直到把这事完成。I'm going to let them stay on what they're doing. It's really important. Instead, the team that's on the critical path, we're going to work hard as hell together." But like, we're going to burn to get through it.

我们不会把所有人都叫过来，因为如果你不这么做……We're not going to pull everyone over cuz if you don't do that

主持人：或者你过去可能做过的事，尤其是在 Zer，那时候你有会议、招聘之类的事情。你会说，比如这个团队正处于关键路径上，我们把所有这些破事都从他们身上拿掉。完全是。招聘、大学之行，你不需要参加全员会议和所有这些事情。所以，你可能会有所迟疑。顺便说一句，这实际上比增加人手有效得多。Host: or what you might have done in the past is especially in Zer where it was you had meetings, recruitment, all that. You would say like for this team on a critical path, we remove them from all of the BS. Totally. The recruitment, the university trip, you don't need to attend all hands and all these things. So, you can be hesitant. Which actually, by the way, works so much better than adding people.

Will Larson：有时也会跟大家说，比如：“听着，这会是一场为期两周的冲刺。能承诺投入的人，请尽管加入，包括多投入一些工时。之后你们可以休息一段时间。”或者说，你会设置一些激励措施，把他们当成年人看待，然后问他们愿不愿意。很多时候，人们会……我知道，在我的工作之外的生活中，有时你愿意为了某件事承担这样的付出，尤其是当你知道我之后会以某种方式回报你时。如果你不这么做，实际会发生的是，在一家真正不断成长的公司里，每隔……都会出现一次危机。对。Will Larson: And also sometimes telling people like, look, this will be a twoe push. Anyone who can commit to it, please do so. including putting extra hours and in return you can take time off afterwards or you know like you create incentives and you just treat them as adults and you're saying like can you and of often times people will like I know in my life outside of work sometimes you are okay taking a thing for this one thing especially when you know that I will repay you in kind somehow and if you don't do that the thing that happens is actually at a at a real growing company there's a crisis every Yeah.

Will Larson：这意味着，如果你把人轮换到危机应对岗位，那么每天每个人都会面临危机，这会让人产生一种濒临崩溃的感觉。我记得在 Stripe 工作一两年后，和一个人聊过这件事。我们聊到 Stripe 到那时为止的运作方式，他打了个比方：就像一群人守在城墙上，试图保卫城堡，他们总是要跑去那些眼看就要被攻破的地方，但他们不可能无处不在。即使他们跑得越来越快，也还是没办法同时出现在所有地方。Will Larson: and that means if you rotate people to crisis, there's a crisis for everyone every day and it creates this sense of like devastation. And so I remember talking with someone at Stripe one or two years in. We're talking about this and he's like the way Stripe had run up to that point. His metaphor was like it was like people on a wall trying to defend a castle and they were always running to the place where they're about to get like overwhelmed but they just couldn't be everywhere because they were getting faster and faster running but they still we're not everywhere all at once.

我们想做的是转向这样一种隐喻：就像有很多人分布在很多地方，因此在某个地点工作的人只需要解决那个地点的问题，而不必无处不在。And what we were trying to do was switch to this metaphor was like we had many people many places and so it the people working in one spot had to solve that spot but it meant they didn't have to be everywhere.

这大概就是两种取舍。不过，要想成为一家能够成功扩张、快速发展的公司，你确实得进入这样一种状态：不再总是同一批人同时到处救火，因为这些人迟早会彻底精疲力竭。而且总会有那么一个阶段，不管他们有多出色，都再也无法兼顾所有事情了。虽然我觉得，有了 AI，这个临界点会比以前晚得多。但我也不确定是不是这样。我仍然认为，他们的注意力会先耗尽，之后才是他们编写代码的能力。Those are kind of the two trade-offs. But to be a successfully scaling company that's growing quickly, you do have to get to a mode where it's not the same people running everywhere at once because those people just completely burn out over time. And you there's a certain point where they just can't manage the coverage anymore no matter how amazing they are. Although I think the question with AI is that point much further than it was before. But I'm not sure if it is. I still think their attention runs out before their ability to write code does.

作为 EM 后沦为官僚的风险The risks of becoming a bureaucrat as an EM

最近，我还在想一件事：关于那些长期稳定、主人翁意识很强的团队，可以拿 Slack 举个例子。聊天市场上有 Google Chat、Mattermost、Microsoft Teams 和 Slack，姑且把它们看作四大竞争者。大家对这一市场已经有了相当清楚的认识。再说，如果你有一家 AI 初创公司，也可以指示 AI 去复制 Slack。有意思的是，如果你这么做，AI 会照搬 Slack 的界面，以及背后那些开源的东西。首先，背后有很多决策从未被记录下来，只有 Slack 的员工才了解这些；而这些决策需要花好几年才能摸索出来——如果你自己动手构建，也会逐渐弄明白。Also recently something that I was thinking about this with the durable high ownership teams is just an example with Slack on how you have Google Google chat you have mattermost you have Microsoft teams and slack let's say these are four big competitors for the chat market and it's pretty well understood was there and oh and you have AI your startup you could also in instruct an AI to like copy Slack and here's the interesting thing you know if if you do it the AI would copy Slack's UI and or behind open source things. First of all, there's a lot of decisions that have never been documented that are behind the scenes that people at Slack will know and they take it takes years which if you build it, you'll figure it out.

如果你的规模足够大，能应付并发量、交付平台之类的问题，诸如此类。不过先不说这些，Slack 推出了 Slack agents，这是一个非常棒的集成，可以让编码代理在 Slack 内完成工作。它用起来简直太顺畅了，设计得也非常周到。If you're big enough from the concurrency, deliverability platforms, yada yada yada. But taking that aside, Slack launched Slack agents, which was a super sweet integration with coding agents and that do the work inside of Slack. It just works beautifully. It's been well thought out.

显然，这是一支具备领域背景的团队，而且他们显然一直在幕后与其他团队和合作伙伴合作。我就有点纳闷：等等，为什么其他竞争对手都还没有推出它？Clearly like this is a team that has a domain context and they've clearly been working behind the scenes with teams partners. I'm kind of like hang on why has none of the other competitors launched it.

为什么 Google Chat 那边也有这么厉害的人？这些人都深耕这个领域。我想，这就是我开始意识到这一点的地方——从这个例子开始，我逐渐意识到，Slack 里有这么多在做事的人，大概是有价值的。我敢肯定，要是知道在那里工作的人有多少，我们肯定会吓一跳。我知道，Uber 怎么会有这么多人？但他们正在做这些事情——他们不仅能运营好现有业务，还在不断重新发掘随着世界变化、客户会想要什么。你知道，其他公司似乎一直没有作出回应，尽管智能体已经出现有一段时间了；他们就是没有回应。Slack 不只是回应了，他们还做出了一件客观上很不错的东西，而且现在别人也能照着做了。但你们是怎么做到的呢？Why has Google chat who have amazing people as well? These are all people that have the domain and I think this is where I'm starting to this one example just starting to realize like there is probably value in like Slack having all these people who are working. I'm sure there's we would be horrified of how many people work there. I know it's from Uber like why does Uber have this many people but they're working on this but they're they're not only able to operate what they have but they are they keep reinventing what customers will want as the world changes you know the other companies seem to have not been responded even though agents have been here for a while they just haven't responded Slack has not only responded they did something that is objectively good and now it's copyable but how did you get there right

Will Larson：有篇论文谈到，管理英国帝国所需的官僚机构规模，以及官僚人数如何持续增长，即使需要管理的领土却在不断缩小。这里似乎存在某种固有现象：公司确实会不断扩张，建立官僚体系，增加各种开销。所以有时候，公司似乎就是迷失了方向，失去了实际推动事情前进的能力。但我的假设是——我觉得这对 Meta 的 Muse 项目也是如此——真正有趣、出色的产品问世时，背后往往有一两个获得高度授权的人，他们与创始人、CEO 或高管团队关系密切，推动产品落地，并且能够做出一些不受欢迎、令人痛苦的取舍。Will Larson: there's some paper about the size of the bureaucracy of managing like the British kind of empire and the size of bureaucracy, the number of bureaucrats kept growing even as the territory getting managed kept shrinking and there's sort of this inherent kind of thing where companies do just expand and create like bureaucracy and create like more kind of overhead. So there's something there where like sometimes companies have just kind of like lost the plot on their ability to actually move. But like my assumption if you I think this is true for the muse work on for meta. My impression is that when really interesting good products come out there's one or two highly empowered people that are connected to the founder, the CEO, the executive team that are pushing it through and that are able to make painful trade-offs that are not wellliked.

这些可能是法律层面和公司层面的取舍，也可能是产品层面的取舍。还有一些可能是你知道的那种神圣不可侵犯的做事方式——不能换一种方式来做。所以我猜 Slack 那边应该有某位赞助者。你看，人们不喜欢过分强调高管的作用，但我确实认为，要赋予大家推动困难事项的权力，高管的支持很重要。大概三四个月前，Imprint 从 Jira 转到了 Linear。我决定这么做的时候，基本上没人觉得这是个好主意。可我们还是不到四周就完成了迁移，而现在大家都很庆幸我们这么做了。And those can be like legal versus like company trade-offs. Those can be product trade-offs. those can be there are you know the sacred kind of elements of how things have to be done not doing it that way and so like my guess is like for Slack there was some sponsor and look people hate overemphasizing executives but I do think executive sponsorship to actually empower folks to do something difficult Imprint moved over to linear you know like three or four months ago from Jira we did it in like less than than four weeks and there were basically zero people that thought it was a good idea when I decided decided to do it. We still did it in less than four weeks and now people are really glad we did.

它解决了我们在集中式问题管理方面遇到的许多问题，让智能体能够清楚地了解任务进展到哪一步、领取并处理任务，还能在一定程度上统一管理任务，等等。It solved a lot of problems we had about having centralized issue management so the agents could actually know where tasks were, pull them down, work them, actually do kind of task unification, etc.

没有那个功能，我们真的很难管理任务工作量。不过，在我这么做之前，大约230个人里，可能只有三个人觉得这是个好主意。我当时就是……你懂的，硬是推行了。我觉得现在大家会想：“哦，那是个好主意，只是他们当时没意识到。”有时候，你确实需要有人愿意冒险。而另一方面，你也需要评判高管和其他高级领导者：他们让我们冒的这些风险，究竟是不是值得。We're having a really hard time managing workloads of tasks without that. But there were like maybe three people out of like 230 that thought it was a good idea before I did it. And that one I just, you know, pushed through. And I think now people are like, "Oh, that was a good idea, but they just didn't think it was." And sometimes you do have to have someone who's willing to take the risk. And then, you know, the flip side is you then need to judge execs and other senior leaders on are the risks they made us take good.

Will Larson：所以我觉得，迁移到 Linear 大约三个月后，大家已经没人再提 Jira 了，当然也没人对这次变更感到不满。大家都挺高兴的。不过反过来说，如果大家讨厌这次变更，他们就应该团结起来让我丢掉工作，对吧？但我觉得很多时候，人们不会因此被追究责任。这就是那些权力很大的高管赞助人的另一面：他们确实能打造出很棒的产品，但有时候我们也会任由他们做出极其愚蠢的事，却不追究他们的责任，Will Larson: And so I think 3 months into the linear migration, I think, you know, no one talks about Jira anymore, but certainly no one's upset about the change. People are really glad with it. But conversely, if if people had hated it, like they should be like, you know, rallying to get me fired, right? But I think a lot of times people don't get held account to this. And so that's the flip side of that highly empowered executive sponsor that does make these great products. Sometimes we let them do incredibly boneheaded things and don't hold them to account,

主持人：这正好引出了我们接下来要谈的话题——高管。Host: which is great segue to talk about executives.

如何成为一名 CTO？How to become a CTO?

你曾经担任过 CTO，也就是一位高管。能不能说说，在你看来，高管意味着什么？如今工程师要怎样才能走到这个层级？我喜欢做高管这个想法，喜欢能够做决策——包括一些不受欢迎的决策——也喜欢帮助他人、帮助公司。以前的晋升路径是什么样的？现在又是什么样的？如果有变化的话。You've been a CTO, which is a former executive. Can you tell me what in your interpretation executive is and how what is the career path today to get to that level from an engineer like okay like I like the idea of executive I like that to have be able to make decisions including unpopular ones helping people helping companies what was the old path and what's the new path if there's any

Will Larson：所以我觉得过去的职业路径可能很短：做几年软件工程师，然后进入管理层，接着逐步晋升，经过中层管理，最后做到 CTO。管理岗位包括工程经理、高级总监。Will Larson: so I think the old path you're you're a software engineer for some number of years could be pretty short then you get into management and then you climb through middle management and then you get to the CTO role management, edge manager, senior director.

Will Larson：没错。所以我认为这会带来很多问题。首先，这意味着最初被选中担任管理职务的人，往往并不是最专注于工作中技术部分的人，因为他们努力争取晋升到管理岗位。这样一来，选拔就会明显偏向那些善于运营和管理的人，而这未必与技术方面有太多共同之处。他们往往确实技术能力很强，但这并不是选拔过程中明确的倾向。Will Larson: Exactly. And so I think there are a lot of problems with that. First, it means that often the people that were selected for management initially weren't like the most focused on the technical pieces of the work because they're trying to get promoted to management and then the selection bias is really towards people that are able to operate well, which doesn't necessarily have a whole lot in common with technology side. Often they happen to be really good technology, but there wasn't like a strong kind of selection bias for it.

但要成为一名高管，你确实得是个优秀的官僚。这也是一个很有意思的挑战，而我的很多工作都涉及激励机制管理。你得知道，嘿，如果我们推行这种绩效考核，它会以什么方式失败。所以我们干脆就不该这么做。But you really do have to be a good bureaucrat to be an executive. And this is like one of the interesting challenges where a lot of my work is incentive management. It's knowing, hey, if we roll out this sort of performance review, here's how it's going to fail. And so we just shouldn't do that.

所以我们应该改做另一件事。也就是说，如果你还没有足够多次像官僚那样办事的经历，你其实就没法负责一个职能部门，因为负责一个职能部门，很大程度上就是在当官僚。We should do this other thing instead. And so if you haven't done the reps of being like a bureaucrat, you actually like can't run a function because a lot of running a function is in fact being a bureaucrat.

主持人：那么，你是怎么学会成为一名优秀官僚的？Host: So how did you learn you learned to be a good bureaucrat?

Will Larson：我算是个官僚，对吧？所以，我是说，这是出于无奈。在 Uber 的时候，真的没有什么面试评分标准，也没有什么正式的面试流程。我在那里的时候，我们面试完全没有任何章法。所以你得为自己的职能团队把一切都从头设计出来。而且，我们当时要做大量面试，每次没能发出录用 offer，我都特别难受，因为我已经面试了那么多人。所以我只好想办法解决这个问题。后来到了 Stripe，Stripe 是一家结构和协作都更加完善的公司，我们有很多流程化的机制。我也参与了其中不少工作，并从中学到了很多。Will Larson: I was a bureaucrat, right? And so I mean out of necessity. So at Uber, there weren't like really like rubrics. There wasn't like an interview. We didn't have any structure how we interviewed when I was there. So you had to make it all up yourself for your function. And again, we were doing tons of interviews and each time we didn't give an offer out, I was like so pained because I was doing so many interviews. So I had to figure that out. and then at Stripe, Stripe was like a much more structurally cohesive company and so we did have like a lot of structured process and then I got to work on a lot of that and learned a lot there.

主持人：你有点被卷进去了。你加快了节奏。Host: You kind of got pulled into it. you picked up the pace

Will Larson：百分之百。而且我加入时，觉得很多组织架构都运转得不太好，所以我就尝试着一点点迭代、改进其中的环节。毕竟当时我们增长得相当快。我想，做这些中层管理工作，确实让我学会了如何当一个优秀的官僚——这也是成为一名高效高管的一部分。因为你可以安排有效的流程，避开无效的流程；思考哪些激励措施管用、哪些不管用；哪些架构有效、哪些无效。你知道《国家的视角》这本书吧？在硅谷，如果你没读过这本书，简直都不好意思说自己在硅谷。它基本上讲的是国家如何看待公民和成就，以及这种视角如何塑造政策的运作方式。道理是一样的：如果你从没当过官僚，就不知道如何用官僚的视角看问题；但如果你只会当官僚，也不知道事情实际上是怎么运作的，不知道软件究竟是怎么开发出来的。这对你非常不利。Will Larson: 100% and a lot of the structure I thought wasn't working well at the point that I joined to kind of like work to try to iterate and improve little pieces of it because we were you know growing growing pretty quickly and so really you know working these middle management jobs I think did educate me on how to be a good bureaucrat which is part of being an effective executive because you can just allocate processes that work and avoid processes that don't work think about incentives that work and don't work structure that does work and doesn't work you know the jeopard seeing like a state like you're not allowed to be in Silicon Valley if you haven't read seeing as like a state but it's basically a book about how states see citizens and accomplishments and how that shapes how policy works and it's the same thing like if you've never been a bureaucrat you don't know how to see things as a bureaucrat but also like if you can only be a bureaucrat you don't know how anything actually works don't know how software actually gets made and so it's like very damaging to you

主持人：我理解得对吗？你的意思是，要成为一名优秀的工程高管——比如工程副总裁或 CTO——你既要精通技术，了解技术如何运作，必要时亲自上手，或者干脆一直亲力亲为；同时也要擅长行政管理，能够管理事务，这两方面都要具备。你还说，如果走中层管理这条路，很多时候可能会出现这种情况：要么你从来就不是一名优秀的技术人员，要么等你升到那个位置时，你已经不再是了。所以你成了一名很棒的官僚，却不懂技术。但如果你只是从工程师一路直接升上来，成为一名出色的技术专家……Host: or am I getting this right that you're saying to be a good engineering executive So VP of engineering or CTO, you want to be excellent at technology, knowing how it works, being hands-on if you need to be or just be hands-on and also be a good bureaucrat where you can manage and you want both. And you're saying that if you go the middle management route, often times it might happen that you either never were a good technologist or you stop becoming that by the time you get up there. So you're a great B crab but not technology. But if you just go from like an engineer, great technologist straight up here.

假设你明天就要创办一家初创公司。恭喜，你是个 deitio，你不会成为一个好官僚。Let's say like you're a startup tomorrow. Congrats, you're a deitio, you will not be a good bureaucrat.

Will Larson：我认为这完全正确。有意思的是，我常常觉得，直线经理往往比中层管理者更擅长凭直觉做出高管式的判断，因为他们习惯于处理细节。Will Larson: I think that's exactly right. And it's it's interesting where often times I think line managers are better kind of instinctual executives than kind of middle managers because they're used to working the detail.

主持人：这样他们就能为团队或公司做出更好的决策。Host: So they can make better calls for the team or the company.

Will Larson：他们在工作中所有这些非官僚化的方面，判断力都更好；但在某种程度上，他们在工作中那些官僚化的方面，判断力却很差。所以我认为高管这个职位很难，这条职业发展道路也很难。尤其是在 2010 年代，你必须一级一级地爬过中层管理岗位，才能学会其中官僚化的那一部分；这也是唯一能扩大规模、真正理解这一点的方式。如今这些层级差不多都消失了，但有意思的是，工作的另一半现在反而特别受重视：做出更好的决策、真正了解产品、真正了解业务，以及了解软件是如何交付的——而我们过去在某种程度上淡化了这些方面。Will Larson: Their judgment's just better on all these like non-bureaucratic dimensions of the job, but then their judgment's terrible on kind of the bureaucratic dimensions of the job. And so this is why I think being an executive is hard and why it's a hard career path is that it was you know in the 2010s in particular you had to climb these like layers of middle management to learn this kind of bureaucratic component of it and that was the only way to get scale to actually understand that. Now those layers are kind of gone but the interesting thing is like the other half the job is now really emphasized in terms of better decision-m understanding the actual product understanding the actual business understanding how software shipped in a way where we kind of deemphasize that.

所以我想，你知道，人们会问：“这样是不是更容易？”So I think you know people are like is it easier?

这更难吗？我不觉得这有什么更容易或者更难的。现在要成为一个官僚倒是难多了——当然，“官僚”这个词有负面含义，对吧？但这其实是说，学会如何真正运作一个职能部门，是非常困难的工作。作为C级高管，你往往最后会负责三四个职能部门，其中经常有一个是你自己不太了解的。比如说，在 Imprint，我在过去一年里的大部分时间都负责客户运营团队，而这方面我其实并不是特别熟悉。Is it harder? I don't think it's like any easier or any harder. It was it's a lot harder to become like a bureaucrat now which again like negative connotations right but this is like learning how to actually operate a function is really difficult work and as like a C level like you'll often end up running three or four functions often one you don't know much about yourself. So, for example, at imprint, I was running the customer operations team for, you know, much of the last year, which is not something I'm incredibly detailed on.

我算是有过一些接触，也曾有一位很棒的负责人，但我得学着怎么做，而且这类事情我也做过好几次。后来在 Stripe，我负责管理支持工程团队，而支持工程并不是我自己亲自做过的工作。I have like some exposure to and had like an amazing leader in place, but I've had to learn how to do that and I've had to do that, you know, a number of times. at Stripe, I was managing support engineering, which is not something I've done personally myself.

我当时在负责数据工程，而这并不是我自己亲自做过的工作。所以你知道，到了不得不这么做的时候，你就会学着用这种方式来管理。要在实际并不了解工作细节的情况下，边做边学如何管理这样一个职能部门，真的很难；但这样一来，你就能在更长时间里成为一名更优秀、更注重细节的领导者。我认为，未来最优秀的高管其实是一线经理，因为过去中层管理岗位所筛选出的技能组合完全不同。如何兼得？现在这极其困难，而过去也一直困难，只不过难点各不相同。I was running data engineering, which is not something I've personally done myself. And so, you know, you learn how to run that way when you have to. It's really hard to get the jobs to learn how to like operate a function that way where you don't actually know the details of the work, but you get to be a much better more detail- oriented leader for longer. And that's that's really where I think the best future executives are line managers because middle management has historically selected for totally different set of skills. How do you get both? It's incredibly hard now and it was it was always hard in different ways.

中层管理与直线管理Middle management vs. line management

那么，你怎么看中层管理正在逐渐消亡这件事？你同意吗？它And what's your take on middle management slowly dying? Do you agree? It

Will Larson：现在确实是中层管理者很难熬的时期，尤其是如果你是在 2010 年代成长起来的。你当时多少是按照一种更偏授权的模式、或者说更偏职能型官僚体系的模式被选拔和培养的。可现在大家却说，我们不想要这种模式，也不需要它。所以你一路升到了顶峰，却因为那些更注重细节和执行、而当时被大大弱化的技能，没法再更进一步。人们还改变了衡量你的标准，这对那些因此陷入困境的人来说，真是令人极其沮丧。Will Larson: it's definitely a hard time to be a middle manager right now, especially if you came up in the 2010s. You were kind of selected and trained in this more of this empowerment model, more of this like functional like bureaucracy model. And now people are like, we don't want it and we don't need it. And so you've kind of risen to this pinnacle, but you can't get to the next step because of these other skills that are more kind of in the details execution really deemphasized and kind of people have changed the rubric on you, which is like super super frustrating for folks who kind of get trapped by that.

这绝对是大家现在面临的挑战。我也不知道这一波高管会是什么情况，但这个职位一直都很难拿到。That's definitely the challenge that folks are in now. And I don't know how this wave of execs are going to happen, but it's always it's always been a hard role to get.

嗯，我确实想问问你。有两个人向我征求建议，我会把他们两人的故事都讲给你听，你可以判断他们的情况是相似还是不同。一个人是工程负责人，在一家公司有大约七名下属。他在想：“嗯，我在考虑自己的未来，因为我看到中层管理这方面的情况……”另一个故事来自另一位工程负责人，他有三位工程经理（EM）向他汇报，而有三位个人贡献者（IC）则向工程副总裁汇报。他们一直在转向 AI 转型，最后整个部门也在做类似的事情。工程副总裁对他们的工作很满意，但这个人在工程副总裁手下工作。他也在想：“嗯……”两个人都在想，自己是不是陷入了某种职业困境。他们让我来问问你：你经验丰富，有什么策略可以建议他们，帮助他们弄清楚适合自己的职业发展路径、自己可能想要什么，以及有哪些可能性？我觉得棘手的地方在于，这两个人都花了不少时间做中层管理。Well, and I do want to ask you, two people asked me for advice, and I'm I'll share both of their stories, and you can decide if they're similar or different. One is a head of engineering who has about seven people reporting to them at a company and was thinking, hm, I wonder about my future because I'm seeing about this middle management. The other one was a story from another head of engineering who has three EM reporting to them and three IC's reporting to the VP of engineering. they've been shifting to AI transformation and in the end department also doing similar things. the VP of engineering is satisfied with their work but they're under the VP of engineering and this person also wondering like hm both people are wondering am I in a bit of a career trap and they asked me to ask you well you have a lot of experience what tactics would you be able to suggest to them to figure out what career path could be for them to figure out what they might want what is possible and again I think the tricky thing in both cases both people have spent a bunch of time in middle management.

并不是说他们不懂技术，只是你知道，他们原本有这样一条职业发展路径，而且下一步的去向相当明确：他们俩都会成为工程副总裁。但在他们目前的公司，这种事不会发生，或者说可能性不大。所以，It's not that they're not technical, but you know, they had this path and it was pretty clear where they would go next would be VP of engineering for both of them, but in their current company will not happen or unlikely. So,

Will Larson：现在中层管理者的处境很艰难，对吧？这些职位的竞争激烈得多。所以我觉得，个人而言很有成就感的一件事，就是某种程度上重新深入到编写软件的具体工作中。离开 Carta 时，我的团队大概有 250 人吧，差不多。Will Larson: it's a hard time in middle management, right? There's a lot more competition for these roles. And so, I think what I found personally very rewarding is kind of getting back into the details of writing software. And so when I left Carta my team was 250 maybe something like that.

我加入 Imprint 时，我带领的团队大概有 25 人。所以对我来说，现在确实是一个很特别的重新学习技能的时机。我觉得，如果你身处管理层，现在要么就得重新深入具体细节，要么就是世界变化太过剧烈，以至于你所熟悉的职业在三年后将不再受到重视。我觉得你得做个决定：我是现在退休，还是重新学习技能？When I joined Imprint the team I was leading was I think 25. And so for me this is kind of like a unique moment to actually reskill. Well if you're in management I think right now either you have to like get back into the details or the world is changing so radically that like you the profession you know will not be valued in three years. And I think you sort of have to decide like am I retiring now or am I reskilling?

我也想过这个，比如说，我喜欢的一张卡，我可以就此收手了，对吧？And I thought about that too, like I, you know, a card I like I could just be done, right?

这、这、这就是我想要的吗？但这又不是我想要的，对吧？我真的还是想继续参与其中。而且我确实真心相信，我们的工作方式在过去一年里发生了根本性的变化。只是这种变化并没有发生在所有地方。Is this is this is what I want, but it's not what I want, right? I really want to still be participating. And I really genuinely believe the way that we work has radically changed in the last year. It hasn't changed everywhere.

这背后有一段很长的故事，要花很长时间才能讲清楚。不过，在我工作的领域，情况已经发生了巨大的变化。对我个人来说，这也有趣得多。所以我觉得，首先得愿意退一步，或者横向迈一步。人们想要的东西很不一样，你得愿意换个角度看问题。There's like a long tale that's going to take a long time to catch up, but in the places I work, it's changed a tremendous amount. And for me personally, it's a lot more fun. So first I think there has to be some like openness to like taking a backwards step or a lateral step. Just what people want is very different and you have to be open to like getting a different like look at it.

所以我觉得，比如说，回到一线管理岗位，实际上比做中层管理更能学到东西。一线管理和软件编写方面的工具都非常好。And so I think going back into like a line management position for example is actually much more educational than a middle management. The tools for line management and writing software are so good.

用于人员编制规划或绩效评估的工具基本上都糟透了，对吧？这类事情上的 LLM 应用都不好用。所以，我确实觉得你现在在中层管理方面缺失了很多，我会试着想办法摆脱这种情况。不过，想想我在 Imprint 招过的一些人。有一个我想到的是 Jasmine，我在 Carta 时和她共事过，后来她跳槽过来。她是以 VP 的身份入职的，不过她这个 VP 会直接招聘或管理一个团队，The tools for headcount planning or doing performance reviews are basically terrible, right? like all LLM applications for these things are not good. So, I do think you're missing a lot in middle management right now, I would I would try to find my way out of it. But thinking a little bit about some folks that I hired at Imprint. One of them that comes to mind is Jasmine, who I worked with at Carta came over and she was she was hired as a VP, but she was a VP that was hiring or managing a team directly,

主持人：但她是直线经理。Host: but she was a line manager.

Will Larson：她是一位直线经理，而且经验非常丰富。之前她在 Mux 负责工程，后来加入我们担任直线经理。她现在做了大量软件开发工作——在 Carta 时，她根本不可能抽出时间做这些；而在 MX，她也忙于管理整个职能部门，根本顾不上亲自深入编写代码。那些愿意重新亲自动手的人非常宝贵。如果你就是这样的人，一定要让别人知道，否则他们会以为你绝不会抓住这样的机会。不过，我随时都愿意多招一些这样的人。Will Larson: She was a line manager, a really experienced line manager. was running engineering at a Mux some some time ago and she came in to line manage and she's doing just a tremendous amount of software which she would have never done at Carta because she could have never gotten time to do it and at MX like she was also like way too busy like running the function to actually be in the details of writing. Those people that are willing to actually go back and get their hands onto it are so valuable. And if that is who you are, you have to let people know cuz otherwise people would think you would never take that opportunity. But I would hire more people like this all all day long.

你知道，我们之前聊过，2010年代在保留地上，工程师们有点太习惯于这样想了，比如：“哦，对，我的公司和经理就是来帮我做我想做的事的。”You know, we were talking about in the 2010s on the reserve how engineers got got a little bit too used to like, oh yeah, my company and manager is here to do what I would like to do.

我想做平台方向。不，不做产品，哪怕业务需要也不做。那真的不适合我，你知道吧。我宁愿辞职。有时候他们也会像之前那样辞职。我想知道，管理层这边是不是也有一点这种情况。比如说，再说一次，我不是想对这些人妄加揣测，但一般来说，有些人会觉得：我有这样一条职业发展路径，我以为自己很快就会成为工程副总裁，我想走到那一步。可这是这个行业想要的吗？其他公司想要这样的人吗？不。眼下他们想要的是非常优秀的直线经理，比如说。I would like to do platform. No, no products are even if the business needs it. H just not for me, you know. I'd rather quit. And sometimes they quit like they did. I wonder if there's a little bit of this with management where like look again I don't mean to imply too many things for these folks but generally some I have been I have this path I thought I will be VP of engineering soon and I want to get there but is that what the industry wants? Is that what the other companies want? No. Right now they want really good let's say line managers.

主持人：没错。而且，和那些工程师类似，我认识的最优秀的工程师都会把自尊心放在一边。当业务方说：“听着，我们需要做产品。”他们就会说：“听着，我很擅长做平台。你知道吗？那我就尽力成为最优秀的产品工程师。”我觉得你也是这样。你当时手下有 250 个人，我想，薪酬、股权、地位都不低，但你却去了一个名气没那么大的初创公司，当时它的品牌也还没那么响亮。你接手的团队更小，责任也更少；你就像是把自尊心留在了门外——如果你明白我的意思——然后学到了更多。Host: Yep. And either similar to those engineers, the best engineers I know, they kind of put their ego on the back and when the business said like, "Look, we need product to build." They're like, "Look, I'm great at platform. You know what? Let me be the best product engineer I can be." I felt with you as well that you, you know, you had 250 people, I assume, you know, compensation, equity, status, and you went down to lesserk known startup with not as a well-known brand yet or at the time. taking a lot smaller team, smaller responsibility at like you let the ego at the door if you know what I mean and then you learned so much more.

Will Larson：是的。我觉得在很多方面，这对我来说就是一种好得多的处境，所以有很多因素，并不是说“哦，这是个爆款”之类的，我当时并不是这么想的。这对我来说是最理想的处境，因为我知道自己想要什么：重新深入细节，重新学习如何在当今这个时代做软件开发。我相信，这会成为让我职业生涯更长久的关键。Will Larson: Yeah. I think in a lot of ways it was just like a much better situation for me and so like there are a lot of pieces that weren't like kind of oh like this is a hit that's not really how I thought about it. It was the perfect situation for me cuz what I knew what I wanted was getting back into the details relearning how to do software in the current age. That's what I believe is going to be the unlock to kind of the longevity of my career.

不过，它确实有趣得多。所以对我来说，它也更能激发干劲。我一直都是那种不知不觉就被推上管理岗位的人。回到那个大故事上来……Also though, it's just like much more fun. And so like to me, it's just like much more energizing. And I've always been someone who kind of got tricked into management. Going back to the big story

威尔·拉森：他们当时只是需要一个经理，所以我就答应了。Will Larson: where they just needed a manager and so I said yes.

主持人：从那以后，你就一直被耍了。Host: You've been tricked ever since.

Will Larson：然后他们就让我当了总监，这样在谈收购时，他们看起来就有个总监了，也更容易让人接受。但我连怎么直接管理下属都不知道，更别说当总监了。我只是……他们某种程度上需要一个挂名的总监。所以你知道，他们人真好。Will Larson: and then they made a director so it looked like they had a director and acquisition conversations. So they was more palatable. But I didn't know how to line manage, let alone direct. I just they kind of needed one on paper. so you know very kind of them though.

所以对我来说，这基本上就是我想要的，也算是一次难得的机会。但我觉得，对很多人来说，他们有一种行业背叛了他们的感觉，觉得自己理应得到那些辛苦奋斗得来的东西。问题是，他们确实有这样的想法并不奇怪，因为他们真的付出了极大的努力，只是规则变了。所以我觉得，有些时候，世界看起来非常稳定，我们这个行业也显得非常稳定。我想，在2010年代，我们忘了我们这个行业其实非常动荡。So for me this has been kind of what I wanted and this has been like a unique opportunity but I think for a lot of folks there is this sense the industry has betrayed them and that they were owed something that they've worked for. And the thing is like they're right like they have worked incredibly hard but the rules have changed. And so I think that at certain moments the world looks very stable and our industry looks very stable. And I think in the 2010s we forgot that our industry is actually very volatile.

过去每一个十年，我们这个行业都发生了惊人的变化，和前一个十年相比，情况简直截然不同。Our industry's changed just a staggering amount in the last every decade things are just radically different than they were in the decade before.

我们有点忘了这一点。我觉得，那些在相当稳定的时代成长起来的人，有时候会忘记这一点。所以我确实认为，我们得愿意接受一些横向调动，也得愿意谦逊一点。但如果真正做那些对公司重要的工作，靠的就是谦逊，那么我们就有点忘了自己到底在做什么了，因为说到底，我们拿工资就是为了做对公司有价值的事，对吧？这些公司雇用我们，可不是为了娱乐。And we've sort of like lost sight of that. And I think that people that kind of came up in an era of a lot of stability don't remember that sometimes. And so I do think we have to be willing to kind of take lateral moves. We have to be willing to be a little bit humble. If but if if doing the actual work that's like thing that matters to the company is humility, then we've sort of like lost lost track of what we're doing here because we really do just get paid to do things that are valuable to the companies, right? Like they don't there's no like entertainment orientation to why these companies employ us.

Will Larson：是啊。那 TLM 这个角色呢，也就是技术负责人兼经理？这是个我们曾宣布已经消亡的角色。你和我都曾把它宣判为死路一条。Will Larson: Yeah. What about the TLM role, tech lead manager? This was a role that we declared dead. You and me both declared dead as a as a dead end.

它确实存在，不过那还是以前的事了，你知道，那些技术负责人也会被分配一支很小的团队来管理。我们在 Zer 就明确说过，这只会让职业发展陷入停滞。如果你的经验很丰富，我觉得你也说得很清楚：这就是个陷阱。我想你有那篇文章。你现在怎么看这个职位？挺有意思的。It's is there but this was back in you know like the tech leads who gave who were given a very small team to manage as well and we were clear like in Zer that it's just a career rut and if your experience is great I think you also made it clear that it's a trap. I think you have that article. What do you think about this role now? It's funny.

这仍然是个陷阱，但却是个很受追捧的陷阱。我认为，在很多情况下，实际上别无选择，也没有替代方案。所以，与其说它是个陷阱，不如说它就是现状。因此，我认为很多公司的管理层级正在扁平化。It's it's still a trap, but it's a highly demanded trap. And so, and I think in many cases there's no way to actually there's no alternative. So, kind of it's it's less a trap than simply what's there. And so, I think in a lot of companies, management is getting flattened.

主持人：所以，我们开始看到，比如说一位总监手下有一群技术负责人，还有大概30个人，另外各处还有几个技术负责人。Host: So, we're starting to see like a director, let's say, have a bunch of like tech tech leads and like a or of like, you know, 30 people and a couple of tech leads here and there.

威尔·拉森：是的。我觉得你看到的可能是两种模式之一：有工程经理，但他们管理的范围大得多。因此，与以前相比，他们实际上不会那么深入地参与每个人的具体工作，因为他们管理的人数可能是12、13、14人，而以前大概是4到8人。Will Larson: Yep. I think you're either seeing kind of two models. You're seeing that there are engine managers, but they're managing much larger scopes. And so they're actually like less kind of hands-on the individuals than they were before because they're managing say like 12 13 14 people before instead of like you know like four to four to eight.

我们还看到，董事们开始管理技术负责人兼经理，而不是管理这些一线经理。不同公司都在尝试不同的做法。但我觉得，这正是我现在看到整个行业在寻求人才的方向。我也确实觉得，我们在 Imprint 招到的一些最优秀的人，原本从事的是更纯粹的管理工作，后来加入我们时却很想写软件，而他们一直以来都非常出色地兼顾了这两方面。And then we're also seeing kind of directors are then managing tech lead managers instead of managing kind of these line managers. And different companies are trying different things. But I think this is where I see the industry kind of asking for folks right now. And I do say like some of the best folks we've hired at Imprint have been folks that were in like more pure management roles that came in but really wanted to be writing software and have just been doing an amazing job of kind of like doing a blend of both.

很难找到那种人，他们几乎就像是……It is hard to find those folks where it's almost like

Will Larson：面试他们，看看他们能不能成为优秀的工程经理，然后比如问问他们，会不会因为不能写更多软件而感到沮丧？其实你想要的就是这样的人。但这很难，你知道，我们目前面试他们的方式并不是这样。我觉得我们只是找到了一些很优秀的人，但这才是我们真正想要的角色。Will Larson: interview them to be a great EM and then like do you just get frustrated you're not writing more software? It's really that person is kind of what you want. But it's hard, you know, not how we've been interviewing them so far. I think we've just found a few great folks, but that is the role that we really want.

说到底，这又回到了那个问题：你想要的是那些有能力处理官僚事务、但并不想做这些事的人——有能力，却没有意愿。因为如今我看到真正特别高效的，恰恰就是这类人。他们需要时可以处理那些事务，但通常还是会直接写软件，而这才是大部分价值真正所在。And again, it kind of goes back to this thing where you want people who have the capability to do the bureaucratic parts, but don't want to like the capability but not the desire because those are really the folks that I see super effective these days. They can use that when they need to, but they default to actually writing like software, which is really where most of the value is.

威尔的写作Will’s writing

主持人：作为最后一个话题，我想问问你是怎么写作的。你一直都是一位非常高产的作家。你依然如此，我真的很喜欢你的博客。每次有新文章，我都会去看看。Host: As a closing topic, I wanted to ask you about how you write. You've been such a prolific writer. You Still, I really enjoy your blog. Whenever there's a new article, I check it out.

你也可以订阅。我订阅了一份邮件通讯，确实会收到发到收件箱里的邮件。你是如何看待写作的？你对 AI 有什么看法？另外，你怎么看现在有很多 AI 写作的情况？不只是 LinkedIn 这样的社交媒体上——这我们都知道——一些作者也开始用 AI 写作了。他们在 AI 出现之前写作时并不用 AI，但现在开始稍微用一点了。我在线写作大约有 20 年了，在我的博客上写作。我于 2007 年创办了《非理性繁荣》（Irrational Exuberance），然后，嗯，第二年——可能是五月、六月左右吧——我开始写它。There's also you can subscribe. There's an email that I subscribe to and I actually get it in my inbox. How you approach writing and what you think about AI and also what is your take on there's a lot of AI writing going on, not just for social media on LinkedIn, we know that, but also for some authors who before AI, they didn't write with AI, but now they're starting to a little bit. So, I've been writing for about 20 years on online in my blog and I founded Irrational Exuberance in 2007 and then, you know, in next year I actually might have been like May or June or something when I started writing it.

所以，我快迎来这个差不多 20 周年的纪念日了。So, I'm getting close to this 20-y year kind of anniversary.

刚开始写作时，我基本上只是想弄明白怎么通过拓展人脉找到一份工作。我做了大量教程，内容就是“我是这样做这个的”。那是个不一样的时代。现在，你只要问 AI：“X 要怎么做？”它就能为你写一篇很棒的教程，甚至可能直接替你把事情做了，对吧？后来我开始在 Uber 工作，也开始多写一些自己在超大规模系统领域学到的东西。等到我在 Stripe 写作时，事情才真正有了起色，因为我觉得 Stripe 不仅有很多值得学习的东西，而且也很推崇写作。这真的给了我工作的动力。后来，我把自己在 Stripe 写过的内容汇集起来，写成了第一本书《优雅的难题》，这也成了这些积累的结晶。之后，我的势头越来越好。And the when I first started writing, I was simply trying to figure out how to like network my way into a job basically. But I did a ton of tutorials just like here's how I did this and this was a different era. now the sort of thing that you just ask you know an AI like how do I do X and it would write a great tutorial just for you or maybe just do it for you directly right then as I started working at Uber I started writing a little bit more of like the things I've been learning in hypers scale and then it really took off when I was writing at Stripe because I think Stripe was a place that both had a lot to learn but a real like love of writing and that to me like really energized my work and then wrote my first book kind of the culmination of the things I had written and stripe an elegant puzzle and then got a lot of momentum.

我想总共是四本书。至少未来十年内，我大概不会再写书了。嗯，或许永远都不会。但我觉得这对我来说真的带来了巨大的改变。think a total of four books. Probably not writing another book for at least a decade. M maybe not ever. But I think it's just been it's been so transformational for me.

我觉得，很多时候，人们认识我——其实这种情况并不常见——完全是因为我写的书或者博客。我确实相信，写作是我们作为个体真正能够改变行业形态的一种独特方式。我觉得，当你做到这一点时，就会有一些小事慢慢冒出来。比如对你来说，那个三峰式薪酬的部分，对吧？I think like so much of like when people know me, which is not that very often really, but like when they people know me, it's exclusively from the books that I've written or the blog. And I really do believe writing is like unique way that we as individuals can actually change the shape of the industry. And I think when you've done that, there's like little things that kind of pop up. So for you, like the trrimodal kind of salary piece, right?

首先，它有个令人印象深刻、容易记住的名字，这很有帮助；但我觉得，这也是一个非常重要的观察，只是很多人没有理解。我觉得你改变了很多人看待薪酬的方式。And that is first like a memorable name that helps, but also like I think was like a really important observation that a lot of people didn't understand. I think you've you've changed a lot of people in how they approach compensation.

此外，Patrick McKenzie 关于谈判的研究也很有影响力，可能为世界各地的人们创造了巨大的财富。And then Patrick McKenzie has his work on negotiation. so impactful, probably created so much wealth for people in the world.

主持人：我觉得他可能会试着追踪自己在这方面创作了多少东西，不过我不确定现在是不是还这样。但说到我的书，我真的觉得我改变了这个行业。我觉得，尤其是《Staff Engineer》这本书，我认为它创造了“Staff Plus”这个概念，对吧？还有其他一些事情，我觉得没那么适合被引用，但也确实很重要。而且，在任何一家公司里，我的工作都不可能以这种方式影响整个行业。Host: I think he might try to track how much he's he's created on it, but I'm not I'm not sure if that's still true. But for my books, I really think I've changed the industry with and I think staff engineer I think in notably I think like the staff plus kind of concept that book created staff plus as like a concept, right? And there's other things that I think are like less like quotable but have that mattered. And there's just like there's nothing I could have done in my work in any company that could have impacted the industry in this way.

主持人：这么多人，而且如此积极，或者我记得《优雅的谜题》和 SAP 工程师这两者。我读了它，并从中获得了很多指导。Host: This many people and so positively or I remember the both the elegant puzzle and sap engineer. I read it and I took I took a lot of guidance from it

Will Larson：这真的非常强大。然后我会想到用 AI 写作——20 年来，我在创作、撰写这些内容上已经投入了数万小时。我写作时并不是特别注重文笔打磨；我的意思是，我更想把想法表达出来，而不是努力写出最好的博客文章。写出优秀的博客文章，从来都不是我写作时最看重的；我们只是想把这些想法写下来，找个地方记录下来。Will Larson: and that's just so powerful. And then I think about writing with AI and like I've spent tens of thousands of hours over 20 years creating this writing this stuff. I'm not like super craft oriented in my writing by which I mean I really trying to get ideas out more than I'm trying to write like the best blog post. I've never been craft oriented in terms of writing great blog posts and we're just trying to get the ideas out written somewhere.

主持人：我觉得我喜欢你写作的地方，在于里面有很多非常有力的观点。重点不在于写作本身。就是说，我觉得你写得还不错，读起来也挺愉快，但我喜欢它并不是因为读起来愉快。观点一出现，就让我开始思考；我思考并不是因为你是怎么呈现它的。再说一次，呈现方式没问题，但真正打动我的，是那个观点。Host: I think I like what I like about your writing is there are very punchy ideas. It's it's not about the writing per se. Like you're you're I would say you're a decent writer or it's enjoyable, but it's not it's not like I don't like it because it's enjoyable to read. The idea comes and is there and it makes me thinking and I'm not thinking because of how you presented it. And again, the presentation is fine, but the idea is what brings me home.

Will Larson：是的，写得相当简略，而且……Will Larson: Yeah, it's pretty minimal writing and that

主持人：而且你有些文章很短。是啊，Host: and some of your articles are short. Yeah,

主持人：这甚至不是篇幅的问题。我写东西比你啰嗦得多——你也知道——但那只是我天生的风格。而你的写作不必像我喜欢你的写作那样……我喜欢的是，你没什么可说的时候，写作里就不会浪费一句话。而且，这就完整了。Host: it's not even about the length. I'm way more wordy in my writing than than you are, which you will know, but it's just my natural style. But in yours, it doesn't have to be like what I like about yours, you don't waste a breath in your writing when there's not much. And that and that's complete.

Will Larson：然后我会想到自己整理出来的那些东西，还有那些我试图改变人们想法的事。对我来说，用 AI 写作就像是把这些全都扔掉。所以我想，我从来没办过那种想吸引大量读者的 newsletter。更多的是，如果你想读我写的东西，那就是这样。Will Larson: And then I think about that all the stuff I put together, all the things I've tried to change people's minds on. And to me, like writing with AI would just be like throwing that away. And so I think, you know, I like I've never done a newsletter trying to collect like a huge number of folks. It's more if you want to read what I'm writing, this is what it is.

这不像我的事业对你来说那样。不过你知道，我还是聚集了一些人，我觉得他们会读我写的东西，这真的很有力量。我知道，如果我写点什么，往往接下来一周就会有数百家公司在讨论这个想法，而能处在这样一个受益匪浅的位置，真的太幸运了。如果我写出来的东西只是个失败之作，我大概就会直接扔掉，而那样的话，我就再也找不回它了。It's not like my business like it like it is for you. But still like, you know, I've gathered like some number of folks and like they I think they read what I write and that's really powerful. And I know I know if I write something like often there'll be hundreds of companies talking about the idea there and the next week and that's just such like a privileged spot to be in. If I just wrote flop, I would just throw it away and it's I could never get it back.

我想，我不会再花另一个20年做这件事了，对吧？所以，当我想到自己花了大约二十年时间精心积累起来的那些优势时，我为什么要把它们丢掉呢？因此，如果我没什么可说的，我就不说。我不会为了产出内容而硬凑之类的。Like I'll never I'll never spend another 20 years doing this, right? And so when I think about the advantages I have that I've kind of carefully built over like two decades, why would I throw that away? And so if I don't have something to say, I just don't say something. I'm not trying to manufacture content or something like that.

我觉得，要是把这一切白白丢掉，对我来说会是个毁灭性的打击。要是为了某个目标而放弃它，我或许还能接受，但如果我去写那些 AI 垃圾文章，我觉得那只会是一种得不到任何补偿的损失。我觉得根本不会有人读它们，而我却会丢掉这个花了这么久才一点点打造起来的东西。我想你应该也有同感。I think it would be such like a devastating moment to me to throw that all away for nothing. Like if I was throwing it away for something, I could maybe get there, but I think it would just be like an uncompensated loss if I were to write AI slop articles. Like I don't think anyone would read them and then I would throw away this thing that I've spent so long putting together. And I assume that you feel the same way.

那是真的吗？Is that true?

主持人：是的。嗯，我觉得对我来说，写作就是我的思考方式。我写草稿的时候，很多社交媒体上的内容其实都是我挺喜欢的。我以前从没谈过这个，但有时候人们会问我：“你的社交媒体策略是什么？”我有很多粉丝，这只是坚持做事带来的副产品。就我而言，说实话，我会研究和思考行业里正在发生的事情，而且几乎是全职，或者接近全职地思考这些事，也会和工程师交流。通常是这样：我开始写一篇关于某件事的草稿，脑子里冒出一个想法。我就把它放进一条推文里，就像是在另一个窗口里一样，然后继续写。后来我再回头看，发现它已经获得了关注，我想，大概是因为这个想法挺有意思。Host: Yeah. Well, I feel that to me writing is how I think and when I write the drafts I often like a lot of my social media activity actually and I never talked about this before but sometimes people ask me what is your social media strategy I have a large number of followers which is just a byproduct of doing things consistently and in my case honestly it's researching and thinking about like I almost do full-time or close to full-time thinking about stuff that's happening in the industry and that I'm talking with engineers usually what happens I start writing a draft about something and I had this idea. I put it in a in a tweet just like in another window and I keep writing it and I later look back it's now got it's gotten traction because I guess it was an interesting idea.

主持人：有时候这个话题挺有争议的。有时候我确实会试着抛出一些想法。我也不太确定，就先说出来吧。我把这些想法称作有点像脑子一抽时冒出来的东西，不过也不完全是，因为我确实在思考，只是并不怎么在意这些事，而且我其实更感兴趣的是这场对话。Host: sometimes it's controversial. sometimes I actually test some up. I'm not quite sure. I'll just put it out there. I call these a little bit like brain farts which is not entirely true cuz I am thinking about things but I don't really care about them and I'm actually more interested in the conversation.

所以有时候我回去时，它会让我分心，但随后又促使我的想法成形，而我的很多想法都与观察有关。这种情况正在发生吗？你也看到了吗？这只会引发对话。So sometimes it then distracts me when I go back but it then makes my ideas form and a lot of my ideas are about observations. Is this happening? Are you seeing this? Which just generates conversation.

所以，对我来说，这就是写作的样子。我发现 AI 有段时间很流行，大家会把自己写过的东西都喂进去，做一个可以聊天的机器人。有些人做了一个《Pragmatic Engineer》风格的机器人，我不太喜欢用这个想法，不过还是试了一下。结果简直有点好笑，因为比如说，我的看法总是在变，我的观点也会变，而它却会把我几年前说过的话原样吐回来。你知道，我们聊过 TLM；如果你有一个 Will Larson 机器人，它就会说 TLM 是个陷阱，而现在我们聊的是，嗯，其实这件事复杂得多。So, and to me that is that is the writing like and what I found with AI there was a time where it was popular to like feed all your writing and have a bot that you can talk to and some people wrote a pragmatic engineer bot which I didn't like the idea to use but anyway I still tried it out and it was almost hilarious because for example it would my opinions change all the time my views change and it was kind of spit back something that I said you know like years back and I know that we talked about TLM if if you had a Will Larson bought it would say TLM is a trap and now we're talking about like well actually there's way more to it.

我会跟人们说，别把你的思考……每当我看到有人在 LinkedIn 上写东西，尤其是同行业的专业人士，或者他们给我发消息时，他们常常会用自己真实的声音发表评论。我就会想：你为什么不就照这样写，哪怕不够完美？这就是你。我喜欢真实的你，不喜欢那种冷冰冰的东西。我也不喜欢 AI 生成的内容千篇一律，几百万人用它，说话的声音却都一样；而几百万人开口说话，就会有几百万种不同的声音。 所以，这让我想到一件我觉得和这个话题密切相关的事：我觉得很多人相信，要想成功，就得创作内容，但他们其实并不想创作内容。于是他们就会说：“唉，我真的很讨厌创作内容，但为了升职、为了找到下一份工作，我就得创作内容。”I tell people like don't put your thinking whenever I see someone write on LinkedIn especially a fellow professional or they message me I'm they often comment with their real voice and I'm like why don't you just write that imperfect that's you I like the you and I don't like the sterile thing and I also don't like how with AI it's got the same voice for millions of people using it whereas millions of people talking have millions of different voices. So, this connects to something I think is really related to this, which I think is a lot of people believe to be successful they need to be writing content, but they don't really want to be writing content. And so, they're like, "Ah, I really hate writing content, but to get my promoted, to get my next job, I need to be writing content.

“比如，我该怎么做？”然后这显然就是 AI，对吧？我觉得有件事，我一直试着反驳大家有一阵子了。我写过一篇文章，具体叫什么我忘了，大概是“如何成为科技网红”之类的。Like, how do I do that?" And it's like, obviously AI, right? And I think something I've been trying to push back on folks on for a while. I wrote a piece. I forget the exact name, but how to be like a tech influencer or something like that.

主持人：我们会把那篇文章的链接放出来。它的标题嘛，说不上吸引人，但又有点像标题党。它是关于如何在科技行业建立影响力的最佳文章。我会附上链接。这是我最喜欢的文章之一，我转发给了很多人。顺便说一句，谢谢你写了这篇文章。Host: That we're going to link that post. It's such a like not catchy, but almost a clickbaity name. It is the single best post about how to be influential in tech. And I will link it. It's one of my favorite articles. I forward to so many people. So, by the way, thank you for writing that.

Will Larson：当然。我写它的原因是，当时这些人会说：“哦，我得写200篇、300篇文章。我得每周都写。我得……”但问题是，如果你的目标是提高曝光度，你需要做的其实是写出一篇能引起关注的文章。Will Larson: Of course. And the reason I wrote it was like these people were like, "Oh, I need to write 200 things, 300 things. I need to write every week. I need to do And it's like, well, if your goal is to be visible, what you need to do is write one thing that gets traction.

多花些时间琢磨。测试一下。比如，把它弄明白。其实你不用写太多东西。Spend a lot of time on it. Test it. Like, figure that out. You don't actually need to write a ton of stuff.

除非你经营的是订阅制业务，否则写一大堆东西几乎没什么价值。要是你只是想把自己的想法表达出来，想提高一点曝光度，或者想证明自己有条理地写作的能力，写两篇也行，三篇也行，甚至两年写一篇也行。There's almost no value in writing a ton of stuff, unless you are, you know, running a business that is based on a subscription. If you're just trying to get your ideas out, if you're just trying to be a little bit more visible, if you're trying to show proof of your ability to write like cogently, you can write like two things. You can write three things. You can write one thing every two years.

你不必写很多。And you don't have to write a lot.

我想到 Tanya O'Reilly。她在博客上写得不多，但每次写点什么，都很有意思，对吧？所以她不是那种高产的写作者，但她写过影响力很大的文章。我觉得《No Glue》就是最明显的例子，它确实带来了变革。所以我认为，即使是那些写很多的人，人们也记不住他们写的大部分内容。I think about Tanya O'Reilly who has not written a lot on her blog, but when she writes something, it says something really interesting, right? And so she's not like a volume writer, but she's been able to have really impactful pieces. I think No Glue is like the most obvious one that have really been transformative. And so I think even for people that do write a lot, people don't remember the vast majority of they write.

有几处内容确实很突出。所以我真的觉得，如果大家能重新围绕真正的目标来调整方向——也许就是获得一些曝光——那么一两件真正出色的作品，远比数量重要得多。我希望大家别再为了堆数量而创作，尤其是当他们自己觉得这其实无助于实现目标的时候。事实上，过去一年里，我面试过一些候选人，他们产出的内容全是那种 AI 垃圾，而且数量还特别多。There's like a few pieces that stick out. So I really think that if if people reoriented around the real goal, which is maybe to have some visibility, one or two good things matters so much more than volume. And so I wish people would stop creating volume if they don't actually I think it doesn't serve their goals. And in fact, like I've seen some candidates that I've interviewed, you know, over the last year where they have just like AI slop content and like a huge volume of it.

我也说不好。我对那些候选人挺矛盾的，因为这就像是：嘿，根本没人看。你还一直这么做，这就让人觉得，你为什么还要继续做这种毫无意义的事？根本没人回应。所以感觉就像有些人在照着菜谱做菜，却从来不尝成品，也不知道……这就是在搞货物崇拜，对吧？他们根本不知道自己为什么这么做。And I don't know. I'm pretty conflicted on those candidates cuz it's like hey people aren't reading it. You keep doing it and it's sort of like why are you continuing to do something that doesn't serve any purpose cuz it no one's responding to it. So it just feels like people who are like running like a recipe but aren't tasting the product and aren't it's it's cargo culting, right? They don't actually know why they're doing it.

Will Larson：所以在我看来，这实际上说明判断力很差，而不是表明“哦，这是个有抱负、努力拼搏的人”。是啊。N 服装。Will Larson: And so to me it actually implies like poor judgment rather than showing like a sign of like oh this is an ambitious person trying hard. Yeah. N clothing.

书籍推荐Book recommendations

你会推荐哪本书，或者你读过哪些喜欢的书？What's a book that you would recommend or books that you enjoyed reading?

Will Larson：当然，我想我会把自己的书推荐给任何喜欢花钱买东西的人。Will Larson: Certainly, I think I would recommend kind of my books to anyone who enjoys spending money on things.

主持人：你的书都很棒。真的吗？Host: Your books are all excellent. Really?

Will Larson：谢谢。当然，我认为《制定工程战略》是去年出版的，我想也是最新的一本，但里面确实有很多有意思的想法。我经常会想到唐·梅多斯的《系统思考入门》。我是听了你的推荐才去读的。Will Larson: Thank you. And certainly I think crafting engineering strategy came out last year and I think is you know the newest one but I think there's like a lot of interesting ideas in there. for sure I think you know thinking in systems of primer by Don Meadows is like one that I think about a lot. read it based on your recommendation.

Will Larson：我觉得，说实话，这本书在某种程度上塑造了我对管理以及在公司里做事的看法。我觉得它其实并不是一本讲如何运营公司的书，而更像是一种可以使用的思维模型。Will Larson: I think it's it's honestly the book that kind of formed my view about management and kind of operating in and companies. I think that it's not really about operating companies, but it's like a mental model you can you can use.

Will Larson：我觉得那本书真的特别特别有帮助。但说到底，任何能迫使你换个角度看问题的书都很有帮助。几年前，我花了不少时间思考类型系统——不是键盘打字那种，而是如何打造更好的类型系统。虽然这跟我日常工作关系不大。还有一本很棒的书，讲的是 TLA+ 及其应用，但我一时想不起书名了。Will Larson: That book I think is incredibly incredibly helpful. But really like any book that forces you to have like a different perspective on something. And so I spent, you know, a decent amount of time thinking about typing a couple years ago, like not not typing like on a keyboard, but how to have like better type systems, which is not that relevant to my work on a day-to-day basis. And then there's another great book whose name I'm losing on TLA plus and using that.

主持人：请问是《Hello Wayne》吗？Host: Is that Hello Wayne?

Will Larson：是的，没错。Will Larson: Yeah, exactly.

主持人：嗯，他上过那档播客。对，他有那个著名的 TLA+。Host: Yeah, he was on the podcast. Yeah, he has the famous TLA plus.

Will Larson：非常棒的一本书。你看，我日常并不怎么用 TLA+，但我觉得其中的理念极其强大：通过语言提高软件的验证能力，也就是让软件更易于验证。这是我们这个时代面临的最大挑战之一，对吧？如果我们所有的软件都是由别人——也就是智能体——编写的，那么让验证变得成本低廉就至关重要。即使在很多情况下，TLA+ 并不是解决这个问题的工具，思考这个问题本身也很有价值。这也是类型系统让人觉得很有意思、非常非常有价值的原因。所以我觉得，目前这些都是一些有用的工具。Will Larson: Fantastic book. and look, like I'm not using a lot of TLA plus on a day-to-day basis, but I think just the ideas there are incredibly powerful in terms of using languages to increase the verification or verifiability of your software, which is one of the biggest challenges of our time, right? If all of our software is getting written by someone else, which is an agent, making verification cheap is really critical. And even if TLA plus is not the tool for that in many cases, thinking about that problem and this is the same reason why typing is really interesting, really, really valuable. And so I think right now those are some some useful ones.

主持人：谢谢你，Will。能邀请到你真是太棒了，终于有机会进行这场非常愉快的对话。Host: Thank you, Will. It was awesome to have you and finally have this super nice conversation.

Will Larson：哦，我也一样。感谢邀请我。多年来我一直认识 Will，能和他面对面坐下来聊聊真是太好了。我们聊天的时候，传统的最佳实践正经历着诸多变化，工程管理和工程师的职业发展都是如此。一个特别有意思的话题是，管理者过去为了给工程师找到有趣的项目，究竟会费多大劲。Will Larson: Oh, likewise. Thank you for having me. I've known Will for so many years and it was great to sit down in person and we did it at a time when there's a lot of change happening with traditional best practices when it comes both to engineering management as well as engineering career progression. One really interesting topic was how far managers used to bend backwards to find interesting projects for their engineers.

Will回忆说，在Stripe时，他的一些顶尖工程师曾向他提出，希望能做更有意思的问题。那时他就已经表示不同意，说自己能提供的只有苦差事——也就是说，这些问题并不怎么光鲜，但正是这些苦差事将推动业务取得成功。不过，在2010年代和2020年代初，许多工程师觉得这种做法算不上特别出色的管理方式。Will recalled how at Stripe some of his best engineers asked him for more interesting problems. Back then he already pushed back saying that the only thing he has is suffering to offer, meaning not particularly glamorous problems, but that suffering is what's going to make the business succeed. But back in the 2010s and the early 2020s, lots of engineers saw this approach as not particularly great management behavior.

然而如今，它在某种程度上已成为职业稳定和晋升的默认选择。作为一名工程师，尤其是资深及以上级别的工程师，你会希望帮助业务解决最紧迫的问题，这也包括对这些问题抱有同理心。Will对于成为一名优秀CTO需要具备什么的看法，也让我大开眼界。And yet today it's kind of a default for career stability and promotions. As an engineer, especially at the senior plus levels, you will want to help the business solve their most pressing problems. And this includes having empathy for those problems. I also found it eye opening how Will thinks about what it takes to be great CTO.

他认为，你需要兼具两种身份：一是出色而突出的技术专家，知道该构建什么以及如何构建；二是能够管理整个职能部门的官僚，即使这个职能领域可能并非你的专长，比如产品或设计。2010年代，很多管理者主要学会了官僚那一套。等到他们成为 CTO 时，技术这一面已经丢了。如今，团队规模更小，中层管理也更少，很多 CTO 会首先是技术专家。Will 认为这整体上可能更好，我也不得不认同。He thinks of it as you need to be two things. one, a great standout technologist who knows what to build and how to build, as well as a bureaucrat who can run a whole function, including a function you might not be an expert on, like product or design. In the 2010s, lots of managers learned mostly about the bureaucracy part. And by the time they became CTO's, they lost the technology side. Today, with smaller teams and less middle management, many CTOs will be technologist first, which Will thinks it might be better overall, and I have to agree with it.

最后，我很欣赏 Will 给中层管理者的建议。所谓中层管理者，就是那些手下有下级经理向他们汇报的愤怒经理。Will 没有拐弯抹角。是的，如今做中层管理确实很艰难。Finally, I appreciated Will's advice to middle managers. Middle managers being angry managers who have teams that under managers report to them. Will did not beat around the bush. Yes, today it's a hard time to be a middle management.

展望未来，可把握的两条路径是：要么回到更贴近软件开发的地方，在规模更小的团队工作，或者担任一线经理；要么就接受这样一个事实：几年后，你主要作为一名巴拉克而非技术专家所拥有的专业能力，可能不会那么受重视。Will 自己离开 Carta 的 250 人工程团队，去 Imprint 组建一支 25 人团队时，也算是走了回头路，但他是有意识地这么做的，目的是学习在 AI 正在改变工程师职业的背景下如何构建产品。我确实觉得很受鼓舞：Will 不仅谈论学习软件工程新规则的重要性，也亲身践行了这一点。The two paths to seize looking forward are either you go back to being closer to where software is being built, work on a smaller team or as a line manager role, or just accept that your expertise of mostly being a Barack but not a technologist could not be valued that much in a few years time. Will himself took a backwards when he left the 250 person engineering team at Carta to set up a 25 person team at imprint but he did it consciously to learn how to build with AI changing the engineering profession. I do find it inspiring that will not only talks about the importance of learning the new rules of software engineering but also walks the walk.

欢迎查看节目备注，了解《The Pragmatic Engineer》关于零利率、工程师职业发展和工程经理（EM）职业发展的相关深度专题。如果你喜欢这档播客，欢迎在你常用的播客应用中订阅；如果还愿意为节目评分，我们将特别感谢。Do check out the show notes on related the pragmatic engineer deep dives on zero interest rates and engineering and EM careers. If you enjoy the podcast do subscribe in your favorite podcast player and a special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show.

主持人：谢谢。我们下次再见。Host: Thanks. And I'll see you in the next