Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

By: Sarah Drasner

Narrated by: Phil Hawksworth

A lot of Engineering Managers and leaders studied for years and years to become the best Engineer they possibly could be... and then they were promoted. It can be very tough for those of us who didn't go into Engineering with the distinct concept that we would become managers, but still want to do our best to support our teams.

I wrote this book because there's so much no one told me about management that I wished I would have known. There's a lot to be purposeful about that many of us learn on the job, and worse: learn on people. This book provides some organization for collaborating with networks of people, working together towards a common purpose.

There seem to be millions of articles and "how to"s on programming and only a handful of resources on Engineering Management—why? It's very tough to talk about something that involves people processes. People are non-deterministic. Working relationships are nuanced, communication is linked with individual values, motivations, power dynamics, and skills. People also have a range of experiences and emotions that are not consistent day-to-day. Hopefully, in the happiest, most productive sense.

I'm sharing what I've learned—not so that you follow my concepts exactly, but rather so that you can be thoughtful about your own leadership and needs. The book goes from the macro to the micro—with topics ranging everywhere from "feedback" to "scoping down PRs".

Though the book is meant to address people in management, individual contributors are welcome to listen to the book as well—perhaps you need to manage up and need some tools to help guide the conversation, perhaps you just want a peek at other concerns within the business—everyone is invited to the conversation.

©2022 Skill Recordings Inc (P)2024 Sarah Drasner

This Audible version has problems

Sarah wrote a wonderful book and the reading performance is great. It is a shame that Audible uploaded a version that has so many play issues. At around 1h38m it randomly starts shouting multiple parts of the book all at once and as other reviews have mentioned there are times that it randomly and abruptly skips sections

The title underplay it's brilliance

This book is incredibly well balanced on leadership and management. It is chock full of great info that would take you a ton of time to gather and boil down on your own. It covers conflict (non violent communication), motivation for yourself and your team, and so much more. Just bought a physical copy to reference.

Great tips, but the audio has some issues

I like the narrator, but some of the audio cuts off while listening. It will just all of a sudden cut out and move on to the next section or chapter. I rewound to make sure I didn’t accidentally skip, but it happened again a few different times.

Great information for any leader

So glad to have learned about this book by Sarah Drasner. As a feller author of a leadership book, I found her insights to be both familiar and refreshingly unique. Very easy listen too.