An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson was very interesting. It's a bit of a handbook and you don't necessarily have to read it cover to cover but instead you can dive into whichever section that is relevant for you at the moment: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732265186

I found "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management" by Will Larson quite good for advice on practical management challenges one comes across in technology companies.

Would highly recommend Irrational Exuberance! by Will Larson of Stripe engineering: https://lethain.com/tags/management/

He’ll be a publishing a book on this soon (An Elegant Puzzle) if you’re especially curious.

Disclaimer: I work with Will at Stripe.

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Wil Laron is one of my favorites

I didn't know that the author of An Elegant Puzzle also did PL design.

If you like this, I can only recommend Will Larson’s (the author of the blog post) book called “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” published by Stripe Press. It a collection of very tactical things of how to think about engineering careers and managing others.

"An elegant puzzle" is also a book with a lot of meat on it.

> By the time our guys get designated manager they've got 20 people reporting to them

Oof, I hope not directly. Based on this evidence (also in An Elegant Puzzle) you wouldn't want more than 8-10 direct reports:

https://lethain.com/sizing-engineering-teams/

This post by Will Larson (author of the engineering management book, An Elegant Puzzle, which was published by Stripe Press) mentions some tools for system modeling with feedback loops: https://lethain.com/systems-thinking/.

Might be interesting to you based on the above.

From the same author:

- His book on engineering management, An Elegant Puzzle: https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Ma...

- His blog also discusses management: https://lethain.com/

What I saw on the first two pages of Customers who bought.... list was:

Database Internals,
Snowden book,
Algorithms book,
BPF Performance tools,
Your Linux Toolbox,
The Go Programming Language,
The Pragmatic Programmer,
Quantum Computing,
A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics,
An Elegant Puzzle

I had to go up to page 14 of the items list to find all of the items you listed and to find the wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner.

Edit: Took out unneeded snark. It seems I fell prey to Amazon algorithms.

I would not recommend anyone An Elegant Puzzle. No disrespect to the author's writing ability and no discredit to his experience. I thought the book had no flow (it was a curated collection of his blog posts, or something like that). He described in detail the decisions he made or things he learned but since he didn't explain any context about the company at the time I could not figure out how any of it was relevant to me. And I've worked everywhere in companies of varying size between F500 and Series A.

I do agree The Manager's Path is a good one though.

Some other favorites are High Output Management by Andy Grove, Managing Transitions by William Bridges, The Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno, Measure What Matters by John Doerr, Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, The Innovator's Dilemma, etc.

Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle is the best book on management specifically tailored for engineering managers.

I find most management books to be useful in terms of thinking about general people management.

I had takeaways from An Elegant Puzzle that I could directly apply to my day to day work. That's more valuable than anything else.

I really enjoyed An Elegant Puzzle (the book by the author, this article is there). The greatest thing about it is that it is opinionated. For example, it gives you the optimal number of developers in a team. You can disagree with it, but at least you have something concrete to disagree with. So many career advice sources I read discuss things in such a general manner that it's hard to take away anything concrete from them.

Post 7 resonates with me a lot. One thing that it only hints at is how fundamentally different thinking about things from a machine/system perspective is from thinking about things directly.

It's also really ubiquitous across a bunch of disciplines, from Drucker's Management & Gerber's E-Myth & Dalio's Principles in business/org development (not even mentioning the huge field of ops management) to the broader field of systems thinking like Donnelly's Thinking in Systems. Even frameworks like the Scientific Method are a form of this type of thinking, and it's easy to forget that these are all human concepts of trying to bring order to chaos. In the software world you have contemporaries like Larson's An Elegant Puzzle focusing on the management aspect and so so so many classics like GoF/Pragmatic Programmer/Code Complete that focusing on the developer. It's neat that the same ideas apply at different levels of the bigger systems (company, project, individual contributor).

It's also easy to forget that the cogs of many of these machines are people, and this article does a good job of bringing that aspect to the forefront.

My current box of books that I recommend to new managers on my teams:

Technology Specific:

* An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)

* Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Teams (Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim)

* Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)

* Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Marty Cagan)

* The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford)

General:

* The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt)

* Turn the Ship Around! (L David Marquet)

* Just Culture (Sidney Dekker)

* Leadership on the Line (Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky)

* Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)

I have been thinking a lot about Systems Thinking recently. Will Larson writes in An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management that it's one of the most useful general tools he's discovered for approaching management problems. That inspired me to read Donella Meadows Thing in Systems, but even after reading that, I'm not sure how to apply it to engineering organizations. It's only tangential to this topic, but if anyone has a good course or book that works through examples which can be transferred to managing engineering teams or organizations, I'd be grateful. When I read most systems thinking materials I get the sense that they are mostly focused on civilization-level problems like global warming, rather than on ways that I can individually use it to understand and make changes within my more prosaic scope.

I also have a little bit of the feeling that the emperor has no clothes, since in spite of all their ideas, I can't find any major company that has successfully transformed an industry based on systems thinking, nor can I find any major social ill that has been solved through the application of systems thinking. If anyone has any concrete cases of those, I'd also be interested.

I have a blog post working on applying Donella Meadows' Leverage Points to an engineering problem (incident retrospectives), but it's unsatisfying enough that I haven't figured out how to make it publishable.

1. "An Elegant Puzzle - Systems of Engineering Management" by Will Larson. His blog & "Staff Eng" posts are helpful as well. https://lethain.com/tags/staff-eng/

2. "The Phoenix Project", "The Unicorn Project" (novels), and "DevOps Handbook" by Eugene Kim, on how different parts of a tech + non-tech organization come and work together.

3. "High Output Management" by Andrew Grove on overall technical management.

4. "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr on setting objectives and measuring their progress.

5. "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande on thinking through replicable processes.

6. "Who" by Geoff Smart on hiring.

7. "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek and "The Culture Code" by Daniel Coyle on creating culture and reasons for why people do the work. It's an important part of any management process, double import because of how often it is lost in technical management.

I suppose link compilations like this have some value some times. But if you clicked on it because you're new to EM and keen, here are a few books that are much more helpful IMO:

- The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier

- An Elegant Puzzle, by Will Larson

- Team Topologies, by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

- Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows

- Also see: references cited in the above and other works by same authors

Disclaimer: Not a seasoned EM and definitely not the first to recommend these on HN.