Ask HN: Books on engineering management, company growth, etc.? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Books on engineering management, company growth, etc.?

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Anyone have any good reads centered on engineering management ideally at companies in small to mid level? I'm not looking for a management style per se, I just want to read about personal accounts from people in the field.

Seems like there must be some good memoirs out there that aren't just self-help management books.

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Well... Peopleware by DeMarco and (of course) Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. Also... just noticed that Richard Hamming's autobio got published a few years back (and has a forward by Bret Victor!) Amazon has a "Look Inside" feature so you can check out the first couple of chapters and see if it's what you're looking for. I just really love Bret Victor's presentations and Hamming is a bit of a legend.

And I just went downstairs to my library and found "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier. I read the first several chapters and found them reasonable. And I just rememebered I wanted to read the last couple chapters. The ones in the middle are less to do with my situation, but I'll probably read them eventually. Fournier includes a chapter on "what you should expect from a manager," which I thought was a good twist. I found it worthwhile.

These are some great suggestions, now I feel spoiled by choice! If I told you I was most interested in anecdotes and hard-learned lessons from leaders in the space, which would you say most applies?

Thanks!

Probably Mythical Man Month and then Manager's Path after that. But I found this reference to Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" at Mary Rose Cook's site, which leads me to believe it may be "anecdote-rich."

https://maryrosecook.notion.site/Build-software-quickly-6c09...

Someone recommended The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation, 1988, by Glenn Rifkin and George Harrar - as a business management story telling comparable to Soul of a new machine. It's on my list. (Offhand, btw, I would expected it tainted by the west coast vs east coast business style difference.)

Oh, and in The Soul of A New Machine itself, the "responsible adult" is the engineering manager.

And for far more recent and startup-y stuff, there is Founders at work and European Founders at Work

Ed Yourdon did a book called "Death March" which might be apropos, though more of a cautionary tale of what NOT to do.

Sounds interesting, I'll check it out. Thank you!

I really liked “high output management”

That looks really in line with what I was interested in except I was hoping for something a bit more recent. A lot has changed since the 80s (I think?). Thanks!

I found it very applicable at a 2010’s Silicon Valley startup. A lot more things stayed the same than changed, so this is still a deeply applicable book.

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