50 Great Reads for Engineering Leaders

I’ve read many great books and articles over the years that have helped me grow as an Engineering leader. Below is a list, grouped by topics, of the ones I have found most useful.

Technical

• Clean Code by Uncle Bob (highly, highly recommended)
• Laundry List of Post-Mortems
• Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
• Head First Design Patterns
• Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach — aka the foundations you need to know about machine learning and AI
• Web Architecture 101: A great mental model for thinking about web application architecture.
• These four “clean code” tips will dramatically improve your engineering team’s productivity

Hiring and Retaining Engineers

• ABCDEF’s of Evaluating Software Engineering Talent in Interviews: The six attributes you should look for in each candidate.
• Letter to a Junior Engineer: What I’d Want to Know at the Beginning of My Career
• People Leave Managers Not Companies
• Software Engineering Job Titles
• Track and Facilitate Your Flow States in This Simple Way
• The Mitochondria in Startups

Engineering Processes

• Why is My Dev Team So Slow: Five Potential Reasons and How to Address Them.
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

Leadership and Culture

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni (Highly recommended)
• Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss
• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team: How Psychological Safety is Crucial to Enable High Performance Teams
• The Neuroscience of Trust: Eight ways that leaders can effectively create and manage a culture of trust.
• Steve Job’s Secret for Eliciting Questions: How to get the feedback you need to really understand what’s happening in your organization.
• What I Learned about Management and Culture from Growing Uber’s Asia Business from Zero to Billions
• This is What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like: Insights from a Seasoned Engineering Leader
• In Just 8 Words, Uber’s New CEO Gave a Master Class in Leadership
• How Company Culture Shapes Employee Motivation
• 7 Things That Make Great Bosses Unforgettable
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Drive by Dan Pink
• How to Win Friends and Influence People

Management

• Facebook VP of Engineering on Solving Hard Things Early
• Hire a VP of Engineering — Andreessen Horowitz
• What Does a VP of Engineering Do Again?
• What Should I Be Doing Right Now? A framework for engineering managers to determine how they should be spending their time.
• The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller
• Myers-Briggs Personality Types
• The 12 Factor Engineering Team: Increase your team’s productivity by implementing these 12 best practices.

Business

• The Tyranny of the S Curve: The basic theory that growth follows an S-shape curve and stagnation might happen sooner than you expect.
• Toxic VC and the Marginal Dollar Problem: How VC incentives encourage companies to scale before they’re ready.
• SaaS Metrics Overview: A Cheatsheet to Understand Key SaaS Metrics
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horrowitz
• Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

Product Management

• Lessons Learned from Scaling a Product Team
• 50 Things I’ve Learned About Product Management
• Product Manager Skills by Seniority Level

Biographies

• Elon Musk
• Steve Jobs
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Misc.

• Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t
• The Art of War
• Fire and Motion (Joel on Software): sometimes the hardest part is just getting started.