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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?

#61

Post by staysaasy »

colebowl wrote: 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…

Extreme Ownership is great. I thought at first that it was going to be a pure rah-rah book about the military, but it is actually quite practical and generally applicable.

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

#62

Post by nurettin »

> Do you have any recommendation on what should I do, read to become better and better every day?

It helps to write a hello world for every hot new tech out there. Not to follow trends, but to actually be knowledgeable enough to have a valid opinion. Think of yourself as a radio station who has to buy or at least sample every popular track. Crystal is hot? Set up a web server and connect to sql. Set up a Vert.X server and write a consumer. Set up a simple neural net with torch, train it a little, load it in java. These all take an hour max each day. An hour well spent compared to scouring books for managers in order to deduce some insight on how to manage people. Developers will appreciate and respect you when you know their job at this precision level and it will make your job a lot easier.

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

#63

Post by kitsune_ »

Podcasts:

Coaching for Leaders (Gold mine with hundreds of great episodes, as an example https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/maximize-team-perform...)

Manager Tools (They even have a section for new managers: https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts/important-topic-feeds...)

Books:

The Effective Manager

The Speed of Trust

Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Turn The Ship Around

If you want to look further than traditional command and control structures, I recommend looking into Deming, Sociocracy, teal organizations or the aforementioned book "Turn The Ship Around".

Also, look into norming, storming, forming performing and team operating guidelines.

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

#64

Post by ambicapter »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #29
colebowl wrote: 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…

I also like that book. There are some obviously major motivational things that are different from corporate life (from what I've read, I have no first hand military exp): a camaraderie of protecting your peers with a common mission of literally staying alive, a chain of command with dire consequences, and other humans trying to kill you. None of those things exist in software engineering so there will be people that…

> As a leader, you may have peers that will like you to take extreme ownership because they can play politics and blame you for things. I don't think there is room for that sort of BS on a battlefield but I don't have first-hand experience.

This question is addressed, if not in the book, at least in his podcast. Let me see if I can find it.

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

#65

Post by kitsune_ »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #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 tha…

This is one of the best recommendations for "beginners" because it offers actionable advice and tools.

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

#67

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

Few things I’ve learned recently is that mistakes happen, as long as an honest effort was made, it shouldn’t be a big deal

All arguments are communication problems.

If you’re coding all day you’re doing it wrong. Delegation is the most important. Communication is critical. Tech leads who crash and burn are usually the strongest developers.

Happy team is a productive team. Always expect the best from people.

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

#68

Post by zoomablemind »

jakevoytko wrote: post #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 i…

> The most important thing to realize is how success will be measured...

I think this could be applicable in general sense too, so that your team understands the value system that you establish. People are smart, professionals are even smarter, so they figure out the incentive system quickly. Placing a right emphasis and staying consistent helps to communicate this.

Another thing that adds to the notion of unblocking is to establish a culture of "a long enough before calling for a backup", that is to try your best to crack a problem by yourself, but have a way to recognize a being stuck and allow to call for a help with no shame or sense of failure. In my view, this has both a culture and a protocol aspects.

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

#69

Post by wittyreference »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #56
colebowl wrote: 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…

When I was still a new dev, I had a "superboss" in another city (HQ) managing teams across the country including our little dev team. I was new and did not interact with "superboss"-es from HQ directly. One day after a major release stuff broke in production. The company was losing customers daily. The "superboss"-es from HQ descended on our little dev team in a small midwestern city and ordered "Code Red". What it m…

1. Code Red has been part of broader civilian idiom since, I don't know, the 50s? Use of "Code Red" doesn't indicate anything.

2. Common sense dictates that whenever one transfers skills to a new context, one assess the underlying assumptions and context of those skills to adapt them for use. I'm sure mistakes in that regard will inevitably be made, but I give most people more credit than to assume, a priori, that people will transplant those skills without any thought given to changing contexts. That seems like a very condescending assumption to start with, but maybe I'm misreading you.

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

#70

Post by maerF0x0 »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #56
colebowl wrote: 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…

When I was still a new dev, I had a "superboss" in another city (HQ) managing teams across the country including our little dev team. I was new and did not interact with "superboss"-es from HQ directly. One day after a major release stuff broke in production. The company was losing customers daily. The "superboss"-es from HQ descended on our little dev team in a small midwestern city and ordered "Code Red". What it m…

EDIT- Seems the below came from a misreading of the OP text, But i cannot delete it now that I'm downvoted... Please ignore.

> Skills learned in the military are for war, learned for conflict situations and applying them to civilian environments and bringing a war mentality or attitude to a workplace is toxic.

> only adds to the toxicity of a workplace

What exactly was the toxicity besides your choice to overreact (stay overnight) ? Why do you believe that leadership skills for war are not applicable to other domains?

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