Do you think it’s worth reading tech books these days? As everything changes so fast that by the time it’s published it’s obsolete. Although things change quickly, many aspects of our job stay the same. Here are the essential books for engineering manager that captured this core and its main components – people, tech and product.
Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers
There are myriads of books on how to manage people. But we, developers, are a different animal. Precisely – a cat, independent and moody. That’s the metaphor Hank Rainwater uses. Hank is one of us – a developer that has become a manager. He shares his insights from that journey covering various aspects of the job – people, tech, leadership, conflicts (or as per the book – “cat fights”). He gives very practical pieces of advice, like “Don’t expect if you don’t inspect” or “To lead is more important than to manage“. A lot of things he wrote resonated with me. It’s like someone finally says something you always felt. That gave credibility. And that opened my eyes to a new perspective I never saw.
Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design
What I like about this book is that it’s very down to earth. Which might look weird as when talking about architecture we need to soar, right? But after so many years in hi-tech Uncle Bob takes it easy. He has seen it all – the rise and fall of frameworks, languages and software development paradigms.
“Good architecture is the one that allows to develop and maintain the system with smallest possible team.” Well said.
Robert Martin warns about microservice fallacies and suggests postponing splitting the app into microservices as much as possible. He instead advocates microservice-ready architecture. When there’ll be a strong need you’ll eject a service from a structured monolith. Until then you can enjoy the simplicity of development, deployment and operation of a monolith. You’ll find that and many more insights in the book.
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Project
Allright, so you have a team of rockstars and your app’s architecture is amazingly clean. But that doesn’t make a great product yet. You might say – “But this is not my responsibility to build a product, I’m a tech guy”. Well, these days we all need to wear a product manager’s hat sometimes.
Geoffrey suggests finding your complete product – a true end to end solution to the user’s pain point. Can you conquer the market with a given set of features or your user actually needs a bit more? For instance if your product allows recording in the browser then probably to give the full experience you must also provide some editing capabilities. By the way Riverside is the complete product for that use case.
Some traction among early adopters is not enough to tell that your startup found a product market fit. And winning over early majority is the biggest gap (or chasm as per the book’s title) that most startups can’t cross. But hopefully this book will help you do that.
What do you think are essential books for engineering manager?
In the mood for more reading? Check out my “Growth handbook” review.
Leave a Reply