Название: The Engineering Leader: Strategies for Scaling Teams and Yourself
Автор: Cate Huston
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2024
Страниц: 300
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub (true), mobi
Размер: 10.1 MB

Great engineers don't necessarily make great leaders--at least, not without a lot of work. Finding your path to becoming a strong leader is often fraught with challenges. It's not easy to figure out how to be successful, empathetic, and caring yet tough. Whether you're on the management or individual contributor track, you need to develop strong leadership skills.

This book guides you on the path to becoming a well-rounded and resilient engineering leader. The first half focuses on you, and how you can develop the self-management skills needed to survive and thrive in a leadership role. The second half focuses on teams, including the necessary components of team functioning that will empower and support your teams and the individuals within them. You'll learn how to create and balance both individual and team growth.

By exploring these two tenets of leadership, Cate Huston, engineering director at DuckDuckGo, helps you:

Understand what it means to be the driving force behind your career
Learn how to self manage, and avoid the pitfalls that many newer managers face
Establish evolving practices and structures to best scale your team
Define the impact of your team and its core mission and value
And much more

As an engineering leader, you’ll wear a lot of hats: you’re the coach, the strategist, the project lead, the on-message agent of the company, the supporter, the adult in the room, the planner, the incident commander, the decider, the umbrella, the resilient and emotionally mature person who (somehow?) knows the right thing to say in every difficult situation. Not all of those roles will come naturally. Being the lead can be overwhelming, but you’re not supposed to get overwhelmed. In fact, you’re expected to show up with enough excess capacity to bolster everyone else, too. When the project is daunting, it’s your job to project confidence and help everyone else believe in the mission. And when other people depend on you, it’s much harder to disconnect: sure you can set a good example and take a mental health day…so long as you reschedule eight meetings first. As Cate tells us in Chapter 6, “It’s so easy to get caught up in what other people expect of us and put ourselves last.” It’s all about the team, right?

That’s what I love about this book. In The Engineering Leader, Cate doesn’t insist that you put yourself last. In fact, just the opposite: rather than opening with expectations and obligations and all of those shoulds, the book starts by asking what you need. This inner focus will be a new idea for a lot of readers who for years have been hitting snooze on their own career introspection “just until things get a little less busy.” But Cate knows that you can’t lead other people unless you’re in good shape yourself, so the book opens by inviting you to take a hard look at what you’re trying to achieve for yourself and your career. There aren’t any “right” answers here but rather a focus on understanding what your options are and figuring out what opportunities you’re hoping to unlock. With that direction in mind, Cate invites you to think about how you work and whether you’ll need to build new energy management strategies or expand the techniques in your leadership range to get to where you want to be.

In fact, the whole first half of the book is about you, the leader, setting yourself up for success, building skills and structures for self-management so that you can focus on what you need to deliver: a high-functioning team that gets the work done. And that’s the second half of the book. “Accept that managers are overhead,” Cate says—and then explains how to make that overhead worthwhile. Let’s be clear, this is a book that believes in feelings, and it checks in with those feelings and respects what they have to say. But for all the attention to feelings, it’s never idealistic; it acknowledges the reality that engineering teams exist for a purpose, and leaders are there to deliver on that purpose. In Cate’s worldview, there’s no contradiction there: everyone gets to feel how they feel and then you all go get sh*t done.

In this book, you’ll learn how to build healthy teams that are delivering business goals. You’ll scale those teams, and scale yourself too, by building in peer support and ecosystems that help everyone succeed. You’ll understand the why of the work, so you can prioritize which things you have to get right and which can be just good enough. And you’ll learn how to introduce processes that colleagues are enthusiastic about because they help them move faster, and not… the other kind.

Some of the skills Cate teaches are needed by any leader: managers, Staff+ engineers, and even senior ICs will get a lot from the sections on how to conduct a technical interview, how to give feedback, how to delegate and make a problem tractable for a less experienced colleague, how to contribute to an environment where everyone can thrive, how to debug a blocked team and get things moving again. Other topics, like hiring, engineering metrics, or performance management, are primarily for managers, but the rest of us can always benefit from seeing what’s going on behind the scenes there too.

Who the Book Is For
This book is for two main types of people. It’s for leaders—folks who manage engineering teams. It’s also for individual contributors (ICs)—the folks who do the day-to-day work of writing code, shipping products, and so on. Whether you’re in a leadership role or an IC role, whichever way you slice it, you’re still the manager of yourself. The guidance in this book is written to help you navigate your career, your organization, your team—and to make the best of what you have around you, whatever that is, in the different forms it comes in.

For managers, this book is my attempt to help you find that model of what “good” leadership looks like, finding something to go toward—something beyond the tactical list of things you’re responsible for or the tasks you’re expected to accomplish. I encourage you to develop that model in terms of not only what it means to lead a team but also—perhaps even more important—what career growth even means and how to find it independent of job titles and leveling frameworks.

For ICs, understanding more about how things work can be invaluable for identifying what questions to ask, where to exert pressure, and what kind of constructive feedback to give. The first half of the book was written to be applicable to you as an individual and as a leader, and the second half will help you gain context to better understand what goes on around you, both on your team and in the larger context of the organization and your career.

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