50 Great Reads for Engineering Leaders
Published in
3 min readAug 21, 2018
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
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.