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/

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.

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.