1) 17 Reasons Not To Be A Manager by Charity Majors

This might be my favorite post of the year... seriously. Also, there’s a little bit of Fight Club in an engineering manager recommending this… if I may propose an (18):

(18) If you shy away from becoming a manager after reading - or you think someone doesn't want to be a manager because they recommend - a post titled 17 Reasons Not To Be A Manager? You probably shouldn’t become a manager.

2) Bonusly.

Not something I'm looking to implement, but I am interested in the idea and in the implications on Inclusion. Does a system like bonusly create a culture where 'being liked' is more important than doing good work? And if so, how do prevent entrenchment into cliques that game the system?

3) A Manager's Bill Of Responsibilities (And Rights) by Charity Majors

4) How To Talk To Anyone, a channel on Medium.

Becoming an engineering leader is about shifting towards creating value through influence. In another life you created value through creating and nurturing code. In your new life, you use your words. Some written, some presented, some through face to face conversation.

5) Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think by Tim Urban.

Continuing a sub-theme of transitioning from individual contributor to leader. As a software engineer, you can often reduce your critical relationships to a small handful. Two or three people with whom you prioritize caring what they think. Maybe they're your manager, an influential peer and an architect.

Once you hit leadership, that simple view of the world goes out the window. In a maturing org you might have twenty to thirty people you need to keep up with. At least a few of them are going to be mad at you all the time. If you're not used to that, and you care too much about what other people think? It'll eat you alive.

6) Don't Shoot The Dog by Karen Pryor.

A Tim Ferriss rec. Thinking around behaviors.

7) So You’re An Engineering Manager, Now What by Brian Nordli (Built In)

8) Do engineering managers need to be technical? by Will Larson

This post became my theme of the week. I interviewed one of our ICs this week who's going for an engineering manager role. I was thinking about how he might retain his technical skills, I started thinking about my own technical skills, and as is often the case, it happened that Will Larson was just writing about the same subject...

9) How Agile Changes the Role of the Engineering Manager from GitPrime

I'm still not sure how I feel about 'agile'. Like many, I agree in principle with the first principles. The result seems universally highly likely to be a bureaucratic accountability and reporting system in which standup is mandatory, every. little. thing. must be tracked in Jira and once you get a level or two above the dev teams, everything goes Gantt anyway, so what's the point again?

Nonetheless, it's interesting to read how agile affects the EM role, if only to map general purpose guides to an agile scrum environment.

10) How To Stop Your Best Developers From Quitting by Ravi Shankar Rajan

11) How Do I Get My Team Into Observability by Charity Majors

12) Jessica McKellar, Founder and CTO of Pilot, on what technical managers ought to be thinking about:

There are two things you should always be thinking about… people’s day-to-day and their year-to-year. As a leader, you can shape their experience on both to help them find a trajectory that meets their goals and your needs.

From Rich Moy's post How to Find and Hire an Engineering Manager