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Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

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Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#41
post #16

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 agree; It definitely feels more like a reference book.

I couldn't get on with it personally. While I like reading his blog, the book just lacked personality. Maybe I was expecting personal anecdotes to explain some of the ideas.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#42
post #27
post #7

My two favorites for this are 'Becoming a Technical Leader', Gerald Weinberg, and 'Making Things Happen', Scott Berkun.

+1 on Becoming a technical leader: https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Technical-Leader-Problem-Sol...

+2 It's a nice read with a lot of insights.

Does go off on a lot of tangents, but it's more interesting than books which keep rambling on the same idea chapter after chapter.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#43
I've just started reading "Agile Conversations" [1], and I found it's a nice complement to the other books mentioned in the thread. It's a little idealistic at times, but I like the focus on shared understanding and aligning perspectives. I used a couple of the approaches from the book quite recently and found that it kept the discussion focused on improvements rather than blaming.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Conversations-Transform-Your-Cu...

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#44
I wrote a blog post about this forever ago[0] summarizing what I've seen work.

The most important thing to realize is how success will be measured. It will no longer be your individual contributions. Instead, you will be measured by how successful your team is. So you need to use your time to make your team more effective.

So the most important thing you can do is prevent anyone from becoming blocked. The next-most important thing is unblocking people when they become blocked.

How do you prevent people from becoming blocked? Make sure that everyone knows where they are going, and they know what to do when they get there. Make sure everyone knows what they are working on, and what they will be working on next. Promote good practices, and ensure that processes have consistent documentation.

How do you unblock people? Review their code quickly. Learn to differentiate "I don't want you to submit this because I don't prefer this" (bad attitude) from "I don't want you to submit this because it's going to have a negative consequence"). Learn how to phrase that second sentence in a way that doesn't make your coworkers dread getting reviews from you. Spend your time fixing tech debt that's adding drag to the team.

As you do this more, you should also make sure that people on your team are growing. Give them harder tasks than they had before. Ensure that junior engineers are getting mentored. Correct imbalances: if a specific engineer is always taking notes in meetings, create a notes rotation so that everyone has to do it.

[0] https://www.bitlog.com/2017/10/12/what-does-a-tech-lead-do/

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#45
Read/listen to https://www.manager-tools.com/ they posit that all good managers do these four things in abundance:

1. 1 on 1's (which are for the benefit of the direct report not the boss) weekly for 30 minutes - 15 minutes for you, 15 minutes for the direct report.

2. Giving feedback both good and bad in a constructive way

3. Providing coaching and context to the reports work

4. Tactical delegation of tasks both that you know they can do so they feel good about their work, and also some difficult tasks to stretch them (with coaching)

This plus understanding the different types of role power within an oganization, and knowing which type of power to use when and with who.(hint it's often never the right answer to user your role power to say ''do this because I am the boss'' use role power sparingly)

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#47
post #9

The best book on leadership I read was Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership[1]. He was a career US Navy SEAL and bring a lot of great leadership approaches from the SEALS and correlates them to the business world. His principles lead back to the idea of taking extreme ownership of everything related to your team and the "mission". I really liked his no nonsense approach. The best lesson I learnt on leadership is to list…

Another recommended book out of the military is Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#48

Crazy that no one mentioned the Mythical Man Month by Fred J. Brooks ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13629.The_Mythical_Man_M... ). I thought it was the definitive classic. I also like to recommend Coders at Work by Peter Seibel ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6713575-coders-at-work ). It's incredibly useful to read about just how different 16 ultra high performing software engineers are/were. Nothing pre…

I love Seibel’s work, but it’s important to know he has retracted much of the emphasis on code reading. He apparently read that into his subjects words, perhaps in a manic period.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#49
post #12

> Do you have any recommendation on what should I do Research. Why? Because this question has been asked dozens if not hundreds of times.

One of the skills of a tech lead (or parent, or anyone) is recognizing when a person may just be seeking recognition and politely playing along.

Right, so this is essentially a big circle jerk. He gets to feel like a great person because he's "smart enough" to ask the question. You all get to feel smart by answering the question (that has been answered hundreds of times before) and everyone gets karma and upvotes.

If the OP truly wants an answer they could have researched it, but as you stated the OP doesn't really want an answer, they are "seeking recognition"

Yawn.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#50

Two absolute must reads: Peopleware Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software Both are scientifical approaches to what makes effective teams.

I will second Accelerate. Phenomenal book.

It breaks down what a modern, high performance software team in 2020 looks like. It has the best explanation of what burnout is and the causes of I have ever read.

Accelerate takes a scientific approach to managing teams, so when you try to raise these ideas at your own place of business, they are backed up by research instead of just: "This person said X."

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