manager reads

I've collected a few of my favorite and oft-referenced reads for eng management and general eng/tech leadership. There are a million great management books out there (and a million stinkers, too) - I'll save those for another day. Note that several of these are geared towards ICs (individual contributors) - that's intentional! A lot of my management/mentorship style has been having a relevant article to share about a topic.

reads for engineering managers

• Team Leader Venn Diagram, paired with Enumerating an Eng Lead: The Human Stuff
• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
• Being Glue
• A Rubric for Evaluating Team Members’ Contributions to an Inclusive Culture
• When your manager isn't supporting you, build a Voltron
• Staying on the path to high performing teams.
• Holding balanced one-on-ones, paired with How to Have Effective 1:1s

honorable mention

• Software Developer Promotions: Advice to Get to That Next Level
• Keep your receipts: when doing the Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) work is still not enough

reads for engineering leads

(this is a little less built-out - it's just a set of links that I recalled while assembling the above, but are more relevant for the tech lead side of things)

• Driving Abstract Change
• Choose Boring Technology

honorable mention

• ‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups
• Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.
• How Lionel Messi and Wayne Rooney think on the field (for the Messi part, I have no clue what the author was doing grouping the two)