Book Image

Engineering Manager's Handbook

By : Morgan Evans
Book Image

Engineering Manager's Handbook

By: Morgan Evans

Overview of this book

Delightful and customer-centric digital products have become an expectation in the world of business. Engineering managers are uniquely positioned to impact the success of these products and the software systems that power them. Skillful managers guide their teams and companies to develop functional and maintainable systems. This book helps you find your footing as an engineering manager, develop your leadership style, balance your time between engineering and managing, build successful engineering teams in different settings, and work within constraints without sacrificing technical standards or team empathy. You’ll learn practical techniques for establishing trust, developing beneficial habits, and creating a cohesive and high-performing engineering team. You’ll discover effective strategies to guide and contribute to your team’s efforts, facilitating productivity and collaboration. By the end of this book, you’ll have the tools and knowledge necessary to thrive as an engineering manager. Whether you’re just starting out in your role or seeking to enhance your leadership capabilities, this handbook will empower you to make a lasting impact and drive success in your organization.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Case for Engineering Management
5
Part 2: Engineering
9
Part 3: Managing
15
Part 4: Transitioning
19
Part 5: Long-Term Strategies

Creating a commitment to reliability

Supporting production systems can be some of the most stressful work we do as software engineers. It may involve late nights, spoiled weekends, or interrupted family occasions when engineers must dig into incidents for hours on end with half-asleep brains, all while knowing the company is losing money by the second until systems are back online. It is crucial work that can be incredibly unpleasant and disruptive by its very nature. We may strive to make incident and support scenarios easier to manage and resolve, but in most settings, we can never shield our teams from them completely. In most engineering teams, production support is inevitable.

The goal of production support is to find a balance between the inherent stress of the work and the reality that systems must remain online and available. Our objective is to support these systems in such a way that we avoid burnout while delivering the best possible level of service.

Because this...