Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    3 sticky insights from 3 eng management books

    Ever feel like your brain is blended and you can't even keep up with the things you're learning? Me too. But the good shit stays.

    So here's the good shit from 3 books I read in recent weeks.

    Leading Effective Engineering Teams

    Leading Effective Engineering Teams

    Addy Osmani blends insights from years of practice with studies done inside Google on what makes great engineering teams and effective managers. It's psychological safety.

    If people don't feel safe to experiment and challenge each other, nothing else matters. You want a culture where loud voices don't drown out the hard insights.

    The sticky idea that shapes Leading Effective Engineering Teams: You have to be effectively efficient.

    Efficient is about how you work. Effective is about what you work on. You need to work on the right things to get the results you want. And if you don't know the results you want, start there :)

    The Making of a Manager

    The Making of a Manager

    Julie Zhou talks about her experience becoming a young manager at a young Facebook and growing from there.

    The core sticky insight is that in a growing company everyone feels like they're at the edge of their abilities. You're supposed to feel like you're failing while the people around you say you're doing great.

    If you feel comfortable, you're not pushing hard enough. Or the company has stopped growing and there's nowhere for you to go.

    Give the comfortable parts to someone else so they too can grow.

    An Elegant Puzzle

    An Elegant Puzzle

    Will Larson shares his learnings on software engineering teams across Digg, Stripe, and others. This is the book that clicked with my coding brain the most. I don't know why.

    The stickiest idea was that when you're growing 2x every 18 months, you're basically a new company every year. Everything changes, everything breaks.

    Your processes are out of date. Your code is out of date.

    Your success hinges not on your ability to engineer scalable systems, but on your ability to migrate from one system to another. Because you're always mid-migration. The systems you built last year are no longer fit for purpose.

    And you can't just throw people at the problem. If you hire faster than you can train, you'll reach negative productivity growth.

    It's normal for marginal productivity gains from each new engineer to diminish (+1 to 100 is less than +1 to 5), but never let it go negative. Streamline.

    Cheers,
    ~Swizec

    Published on June 3rd, 2025 in Learning, Books, Management

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about 3 sticky insights from 3 eng management books

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help πŸ‘‰ swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers πŸ‘‰ ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❀️

    Created by Swizec with ❀️