26/10/2020 50 Great Reads for Engineering Leaders | by Jonathan Fulton | Storyblocks Product & Engineering

50 Great Reads for Engineering Leaders

Jonathan Fulton
Aug 22, 2018 · 3 min read

I’ve read many great books and articles over the years that have helped me grow as an
Engineering leader. Below is a list, grouped by topics, of the ones I have found most
useful.

Technical
Clean Code by Uncle Bob (highly, highly recommended)

Laundry List of Post-Mortems

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

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Head First Design Patterns

Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach — aka the foundations you need to

know about machine learning and AI

Web Architecture 101: A great mental model for thinking about web application
architecture.

These four “clean code” tips will dramatically improve your engineering team’s
productivity

Hiring and Retaining Engineers

ABCDEF’s of Evaluating Software Engineering Talent in Interviews: The six
attributes you should look for in each candidate.

Letter to a Junior Engineer: What I’d Want to Know at the Beginning of My Career

People Leave Managers Not Companies

Software Engineering Job Titles

Track and Facilitate Your Flow States in This Simple Way

The Mitochondria in Startups

Engineering Processes
Why is My Dev Team So Slow: Five Potential Reasons and How to Address Them.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security
in Technology Organizations

Leadership and Culture

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni (Highly
recommended)

Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team: How Psychological
Safety is Crucial to Enable High Performance Teams

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The Neuroscience of Trust: Eight ways that leaders can effectively create and
manage a culture of trust.

Steve Job’s Secret for Eliciting Questions: How to get the feedback you need to
really understand what’s happening in your organization.

What I Learned about Management and Culture from Growing Uber’s Asia Business
from Zero to Billions

This is What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like: Insights from a

Seasoned Engineering Leader

In Just 8 Words, Uber’s New CEO Gave a Master Class in Leadership

How Company Culture Shapes Employee Motivation

7 Things That Make Great Bosses Unforgettable

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Drive by Dan Pink

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Management
Facebook VP of Engineering on Solving Hard Things Early

Hire a VP of Engineering — Andreessen Horowitz

What Does a VP of Engineering Do Again?

What Should I Be Doing Right Now? A framework for engineering managers to

determine how they should be spending their time.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by
Gary Keller

Myers-Briggs Personality Types

The 12 Factor Engineering Team: Increase your team’s productivity by

implementing these 12 best practices.

Business
The Tyranny of the S Curve: The basic theory that growth follows an S-shape curve
and stagnation might happen sooner than you expect.

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Toxic VC and the Marginal Dollar Problem: How VC incentives encourage

companies to scale before they’re ready.

SaaS Metrics Overview: A Cheatsheet to Understand Key SaaS Metrics

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy
Answers by Ben Horrowitz

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

Product Management
Lessons Learned from Scaling a Product Team

50 Things I’ve Learned About Product Management

Product Manager Skills by Seniority Level

Biographies
Elon Musk

Steve Jobs

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Misc.
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t

The Art of War

Fire and Motion (Joel on Software): sometimes the hardest part is just getting
started.

Startup Software Development Leadership Lists Management

About Help Legal

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