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awesome-management

Awesome List of Engineering Team Management Knowledge
https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-management

Last synced: 3 days ago
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Engineering to Management Transition
- a management position is not a promotion. It is a change in career
- 17 Reasons not to be a Manager - An article to [discourage the faint-hearted recruits](https://youtu.be/b07887ZzKiw?t=40).
- Advice to new managers - 9 fundamental principles of the behavior required to be a great manager.
- Going from Developer to Manager. What should I know or learn?
- On being an Engineering Manager - Some of these points needs nuance, but others are a good taste of things to come for first-time managers.
- source
- How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team - A full, detailed guide on modern management practices.
- Responsibility vs. accountability - The biggest difference between manager (accountable) and engineers (responsible): `“Bad things” happen for the person accountable, whereas the person responsible can move on to the next project.`.
Building Teams
- Developer Tropes: "Google does it" - It's [cargo-cultish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) to imitate the big names in our industry as a path to success. Instead, the take home from this article `would be that managers and other leaders should be like ecologists; who measure, observe and nurture their ecosystems. Doing so will help build a unique workplace that will yield great results.`.
Roles
- Executives
  - What do executives do, anyway? - Paraphrasing [Andy Grove's book, High Output Management](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679762884), `the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.`. The article also details the failures modes of a CEO: forcing his own decisions downstreams, or various ways of not resolving conflicts.
  - Executives ratify decisions made on the spot - Refines the concept above adapting [Tolstoy's thesis to business](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18089716).
  - US Air Force's Strategic Leadership Studies - A reference of leadership's competencies and skills.
  - What Only the CEO Can Do - TL;DR: `1. Defining and interpreting the meaningful "outside" of the company; 2. Answering the two-part question: What business are we in and what business are we not in? 3. Balancing sufficient yield in the present with necessary investment in the future; 4. Shaping the values and standards of the organization.`.
  - Narcissistic CEOs Weaken Collaboration and Integrity - `The prototypic visionary leader profile is so similar to that of a narcissist, if boards aren't careful, they’re going to end up choosing people who are narcissistic as CEOs`.
  - source
  - Operations and Internal Communication Strategies For Effective CEOs - After insisting on the importance of context and narratives, the author provide an interesting template (good for inspiration) of ritual and recurring internal communication devices.
  - Operations and Internal Communication Strategies For Effective CEOs - After insisting on the importance of context and narratives, the author provide an interesting template (good for inspiration) of ritual and recurring internal communication devices.
- Managers
  - What are the signs that you have a great manager? - `The irony is that you don't really notice a great manager.`
  - source - Echoes articles above, that quote is [from David Packard](https://www.amazon.fr/dp/0060845791) (HP co-founder), decades before current [management fad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_fad).
  - As a product manager, how do you earn the respect and trust of your team?
  - Things I have learnt as the software engineering lead of a multinational - Some interesting points here, some others needs to be challenged.
- Engineers
  - 7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer - TL;DR: `1. I’m a senior developer; 2. Everyone writes tests; 3. We’re so far behind everyone else (a.k.a. tech FOMO); 4. Code quality matters most; 5. Everything must be documented; 6. Technical debt is bad; 7. Seniority means being the best at programming`.
  - On Being A Senior Engineer - `I expect a “senior” engineer to be a *mature* engineer.`
  - Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer - `I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Here’s what I learnt.`
  - 5 Things I’ve Learned in 20 Years of Programming - `A programmer with 5 years of experienced has more industry tenure than half of the entire industry.`. Also see this follow-up comment of [10 things I've learned after 35 years](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21612990).
  - Devs I really enjoy pairing with
  - What Makes A Great Software Engineer? - This papaer doesn't present any clear answe, but a model based on 53 attributes (!). Still a good source referencing other papers on the topic.
- Consultants
  - source
  - source
Recruitment
- Consultants
  - Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry - `When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.`
  - Secret manager trick of hiring data scientists
  - Hire people who aren't proven - If anyone else in the world can objectively say this is a great player, you and your startup won't be able to hire the player. Someone will steal him from you. You have to go after people that aren't proven. In short, you need to be extremely good at forecasting talent.
Motivation
- Consultants
  - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
  - 3 tricks to start working despite not feeling like it - `"Screw it, let's do it"; Start sloppy; Start small`.
  - Some reasons why enterprise software is good and maybe even fun - The majority of us will not build the next unicorn: we statiscally have a better chance to build enterprise software. The twist? It might even be more interesting than you expect.
Culture
- Consultants
  - Adaptation vs adaptability - There is a spectrum between perfect efficiency and being completely flexible. This article explores ecosystems and the flows of material and energy between different organisms within the ecosystem. ([hinted by HN comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20963513))
  - Meaningful differences that makes Google offices more productive - TL;DR: `The people are smarter, your manager (and their manager) cares a lot about you and it's easy to move.`
  - It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind - `It’s harder to be kind than clever.`, or put another way by Abraham Joshua Heschel: `When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.`.
  - source - At one point, even with the most unselfish of intentions, your attempts to elevate the culture might stall. It is not fair, but it's probably the time to leave.
Cognitive Tools
- Consultants
  - Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful - Huge compiled list of mental models. Became the basis of book.
  - Hanlon's_razor - My favorite flavor of [Occam's Razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor), critical in defusing paranoia in a highly political setting.
  - Regression toward the mean - Or why after a period of intense euphoria and ambition, things slowly get back to their usual mediocrity.
  - Locus of control - A framework on `the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.`
  - Disney’s Frozen
  - The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up - `Efficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient.`. A reminder that sometimes we should just accept [the messiness of the world](https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood).
  - Strong Opinions, Weakly Held — a framework for thinking - `“Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the ‘strong opinion’ part. Then –and this is the ‘weakly held’ part– prove yourself wrong.`
  - Yes, and… - `A rule-of-thumb in improvisational comedy (…). It is also used in business and other organizations as a principle that improves the effectiveness of the brainstorming process, fosters effective communication, and encourages the free sharing of ideas.`
  - from a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech
Team Dynamics
- Consultants
  - How to Celebrate the Small Wins
  - Coaching questions for one-to-ones
  - Team Leader Venn Diagram - `A tool for gaining a shared understanding of responsibilities`.
  - Symptoms of Groupthink - Overconfidence, tunnel vision and conformity pressure can led a group astray.
  - It's Not Sabotage, They're Drowning - Some kind of push backs shouldn't be interpreted as intentional sabotage, but as drowning people sinking the lifeboat in an attempt to save themselves.
  - source - Or why trying to create a community from the ground up might not be the right way of looking at things: a better and more subtle strategy would be to enhance the already existing channels.
  - To - practices/).
  - How to Celebrate the Small Wins
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  - A conversation with Elon Musk about Starship - In a team with very talented contributors, everyone's is a chief engineer: you are expected to challenge the status-quo and questions other department's constraints. This allow smart engineers to avoid the trap of optimizing for something that should not exist in the first place.
  - How to Celebrate the Small Wins
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Remote Work
- Consultants
  - A guide to distributed teams - A nice wrap up on the numerous dispositions required to have a highly effective distributed team.
Product Management
- Consultants
  - source
  - Awesome Product Management
  - What are frequently asked questions in product manager interviews?
  - Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already
  - David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit - `Details the story of how Weebly developed one of the most popular website creation and hosting sites on the web today.`
  - The product roadmap is dead: welcome to the age of problem roadmaps - `Fall in love with your problems and not with your solutions.`
  - Kasparov’s Law - Weak human + Machine > Machine > Strong Human.
  - sacrificial lamb product - architecture required to pave the way for future innovative release. That's the cautionary tale of why you should be ready for intense criticism and adversity, if by chance or fate your wander down the path of monumental changes in a business software.
  - the #1 bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity
  - How to exit vim, the Product Manager way - A satire whith a grain of truth, especially the comparison between the basic vs experienced level.
Project Management
- Consultants
  - Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience - The title is misleading, article's argument is: we don't need *project* managers if we already have *product* managers and scrum masters.
  - Best project management practices in 2018? - TL;DR: there is no silver bullet.
  - Escalation of commitment - A.k.a. sunk-cost fallacy, or the rational explanation of why the hell do we still irrationally keep investing in a bad project.
  - GitHub labels for reuse across projects - Simple yet practical.
Agile
- Consultants
  - source
  - Why do some developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? - Because the short-term focused Scrum processes `seem suited to particular types of development, most notably consulting or contract programming, where the customer is external to the organizations, runs the show because they are paying for development, and can change their mind at any time`. Still, google engineers already practice a culture close to what looks like the 10-points Agile manifesto. But that it.
  - Detecting Agile Bullshit - US Departement of Defense guide to detect software projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing (“agile-scrum-fall”).
  - Who are you trying to impress with your deadlines? - `There are companies where those deadlines are set in stone, and a missed deadline is next to fire. That's when the problem starts.`
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
- Consultants
  - W. Edwards Deming
  - SRE fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs - If you are in the business of cloud services, these metrics are certainly great KPIs.
  - source
  - The 4 Worst Software Metrics Agitating Developers in 2019 - The worst KPIs to track a software team output: Lines of Code, Commit Count, Issues Resolved (aka “Shipping Velocity”) and Code Churn (aka "Efficiency").
Objectives and Key Results (OKR)
- Consultants
  - OKRs from a development team’s perspective - On how OKRs articulates with a backlog.
  - source
  - Why individual OKRs don’t work for us - Spotify decision to stop using OKRs for individuals.
  - Google's usage of OKRs - OKR grades are public, but not use for promotion. It was never taken very seriously.
Training
- Consultants
  - Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well - Discusses mentorship practices that work well engineer-to-engineer.
  - What Medieval People Got Right About Learning - `Why apprenticeships beat classrooms`.
  - Developer Roadmaps - Very high-level guides and paths to learn different practice and tools.
Literacy
- Knowledge
  - You’re Not Managing a Team of Software Engineers, You’re Managing a Team of Writers
- Reading
  - How to Read a Paper - Outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.
- Writing
  - Algorithm for writing a scientific manuscript - A process to guide the preparation and refinement of manuscripts.
  - Ten simple rules for structuring papers - `Focusing on how readers consume information, we present a set of 10 simple rules to help you get across the main idea of your paper.`
  - Tips for Writing Technical Papers - Another set of tips, specifically using the example of a technical paper describing a improvment of an algorithm.
  - Write an Excellent Programming Blog - Tips on structure and style to produce great blog posts.
  - BLUF: The Military Standard That Can Make Your Writing More Powerful - `BLUF is a military communications acronym—it stands for “bottom line up front”—that’s designed to enforce speed and clarity in reports and emails.`
Career
- Writing
  - Work at different management levels - A great progressive breakup of what it feels like to work at different levels of management.
  - The Evolution of Management: Transitioning up the ladder - Describe the path and expectations at each management level.
  - My questions for prospective employers (Director/VP roles) - Great list for senior management roles.
  - `That's usually about the time I nope right out of the interview` - Bad signs of a CTO trying to recruit an engineering manager, or the perils of not believing in hierarchies.
  - Get your work recognized: write a brag document - There’s this idea that, if you do great work at your job, people will (or should!) automatically recognize that work and reward you for it with promotions / increased pay. In practice, it’s often more complicated than that.
  - Baumol
Compensation
- Writing
  - L8-L10 salaries at AWS
  - source
Politics
- Writing
  - HiPPO FAQ - HiPPO stands for `Highest Paid Person's Opinion`, a trait of dysfunctional culture, in which power politics trumps data.
  - *The Prince* - Machiavelli's ideas on how to accrue honour and power as a leader. Resorting to that level of politics in a company is a sure way to render the culture highly toxic, as well as corrupting and demoralizing the organization at all levels.
  - The Gervais Principle - A cynical, bleak, but still fascinating take on the management ladder, based on *The Office*.
  - The 48 Laws of Power - Can teach you how to cover your ass and be effective in a highly political org.
  - Selectorate theory - `In selectorate theory, three groups of people affect leaders. These groups are the nominal selectorate, the real selectorate, and the winning coalition. (…) To remain in power, leaders must maintain their winning coalition.`
  - source - practices-for-achieving-large-professional-goals/) is missing the parts about office politics.
  - comment
  - source
  - source
Re-organizations
- Writing
  - source
  - If I Close My Data Centers, What About the People/Jobs Lost? - F50's data centers being migrated to commercial cloud provider. But what about the people currently doing legacy stuff? The answer: retrain.
  - source
  - An Alternative Approach to Re-Orgs At Your Company - `Trying not to repeat re-org mistakes, we started working on a structure that would make the re-org act like a feedback-fueled progress driven by the teams instead of by people above them.`. This is an attempt to extract from the ground up signals pointing to inadequate structure. My cautionary tale: this might only work up to a point depending on the company's culture.
  - source
  - Speaking Truth to Power: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft - After 3 decades in a deeply flawed company, the author comes to a humble conclusion: leaders should embodies the value of their employees. Not the other way around. `Changes at the top — not speeches, training or hashtags — make the most cultural impact. If you want real and lasting cultural change, sweep away the made-men who succeeded under the previous culture and promote the people who look, act, and think more like their employees than their managers.`
  - How the Digg team was acquihired - Acqui-hire of a whole team can be seen as a type of reorg. In which managers will have to negotiate the new employment contracts in bulk in one or two days: `Because acquihires are “star” oriented, if you’re a senior leaders who doesn’t explicitly refuse to move forward, pressure will converge on you from all sides`.
  - I’ve Built Multiple Growth Teams. Here’s Why I Won’t Do It Again. - `Few folks understand probability, and most executives don’t care about the data—regardless of what it says.`
Stress & Burnout
- Writing
  - The Toxic Handler: Organizational Hero — and Casualty - `toxic handler, a manager who voluntarily shoulders the sadness, frustration, bitterness, and anger that are endemic to organizational life. Although toxic handlers may be found at every level in organizations, many work near the top`.
  - Manager Energy Drain - `How do I handle how tired I am as a manager? 1. Defrag your calendar; 2. Delegate messy and unscoped projects; 3. Say no.`
  - How Slack Harms Projects - TL;DR: `promote a false sense of urgency, destroy focus, allow for bypassing project prioritization, strip away essential business context, encourage poorly thought-out communication`. To remediate this, see [How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy](https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2018/how-to-use-slack-and-not-go-crazy/) article.
  - Examples of harassments - How a jealous boss, who felt either betrayed or ridiculed, bullied a capable employee to force him out. Don't be that kind of asshole boss.
  - If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week? - `Our tendency to overwork and burn out is framed by a complex combination of factors involving our profession, our organization, and ourselves. At the heart of it is insecurity.`
  - What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity - `A particular confluence of high achievement, intense competitiveness, and culture of overwork has caught many in a perfect storm of career enmeshment and burnout.`
  - source
Setbacks and Failures
- Writing
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Steve Jobs explains - Why companies fail? - On how sales and marketing takes over product focused companies.
  - The failure of Scaling Etsy - When a company lacks technical leadership: developers waste time in costly refactors, over-engineered systems, and ends up detached from the business and product.
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
  - Early-career setback and future career impact - `Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.`
Exits
- Writing
  - Why I Rejected My Manager - ` I understand now why the saying is: people leave managers, not companies.`
  - Colleague is leaving. How to investigate what went wrong? - `Most of the time people leave bosses, not the job or the company.` And why you're unlikely to get any substantial insights from exit interviews. ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20787874))
  - source
  - source
  - The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - Company stopped providing free soda. The engineers were very upset, but it was just soda and they could afford it. But really it wasn't soda. Soda was the canary in the coal mine, triggering an exodus of its best engineers.
  - How to discipline overeager engineer - Over-achieving talent is looking for a management promotion. Management does not recognize effort. Engineer become disgruntled and management is looking to discipline him. A case-study of a bad situation in which both side shows clumsyness.

Programming Languages

CSS 1

Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

awesome-management

Engineering to Management Transition

Building Teams

Roles

Executives

Managers

Engineers

Consultants

Recruitment

Consultants

Motivation

Consultants

Culture

Consultants

Cognitive Tools

Consultants

Team Dynamics

Consultants

Remote Work

Consultants

Product Management

Consultants

Project Management

Consultants

Agile

Consultants

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Consultants

Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

Consultants

Training

Consultants

Literacy

Knowledge

Reading

Writing

Career

Writing

Compensation

Writing

Politics

Writing

Re-organizations

Writing

Stress & Burnout

Writing

Setbacks and Failures

Writing

Exits

Writing