Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

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You can never be prepared enough for managing and leading people, but if you give it a good try, you'll be one step ahead of yourself. I picked up the book because my mentor recommended it to me after I told him about my promotion at work. As for key points and advice, I gained: align personal values, embrace curiosity, and strive to create clarity.

I confess that some advices in part 3 (the one more into "engineering") sound horrible to me, quite misaligned with the way I understand product development based on software. Though the book is meant to address people in management, individual contributors are welcome to read the book as well- perhaps you need to manage up and need some tools to help guide the conversation, perhaps you just want a peek at other concerns within the business- everyone is invited to the conversation. There are plenty of books you can go and read about growing a leadership mindser, or understand what outcomes you want, or your motivations.It's not just important, it's crucial that we iterate on our own skills as managers so that we can properly support everyone around individuals, peers, leadership, and the business. KlappentextA lot of Engineering Managers and leaders studied for years and years to become the best Engineer they possibly could be. For example, Sarah focuses on Pull Requests quite a bit, even to a point of mentioning possible branch naming patterns!

I wrote this book because there's so much no one told me about management that I wished I would have known. This isn't a tactical guide like many others, which does make it an interesting addition to a library. Drasner encourages managers to find a balance between these two facets, as both are crucial for the success of a project.I was hoping for heavy nugget of wisdom or war stories on the topics I'm struggling with in my few months acting as EM but it's hard to get there on a book covering so much. I know there was more on the manager role that a person who only set goals, evaluate and ser a lot of meetings where she/he is the only person that talk. Learn to Balance People Management and Technical Leadership: As an engineering manager, you’re required to manage both people and technical aspects of a project.

If you're hungry for more on the touched topics, you will find that the book provides plenty of opportunities to branch out, whether it's developing habit systems or building confidence in yourself and others. Even though the author makes some assumptions about the reader — they work in tech, are engineering managers, and look forward to making themselves better — it never underestimates or overestimates the reader. The topics described feel relatable and palpable, as if they're directly taken from your own workplace. The strength of the book lies in its practicality; Drasner does not shy away from addressing common issues encountered in the field of engineering management.

She also provides tips and tricks for how to reduce the risk of running into the problems that she has had to deal with in her career. The book has been edited and compiled as a cohesive whole, and includes a few chapters not publicly available. I checked two of those assumptions, and I'm sure anyone that checks none of them would have a great time with this reading.