Books to Prevent Burnout in High Performance Engineering Teams
by Brian
Categories:
CTO,
Engineering Manager,
Tech Lead
Summary
To play the game of engineering manager, you must accept two rules.
The first rule is that every feature is already late, even if development just started. The customer wanted it weeks ago.
The second rule is that production efficiency must always increase. This is obvious if you accept the first rule.
If you accept these rules and your development team’s production throughput is high, you’re lucky. You have an ambitious crew and strong engineering culture.
But this is a double-edged sword. Your team’s productivity comes with the risk of burnout.
These books helped me think about burnout within my own high performance engineering team – both identifying burnout and taking action to prevent it.
Slack
Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
by Tom DeMarco
Recommended: 8 / 10
Some people see this book title and think it’s about Slack the SaaS company. But this book is actually about adding slack to your software development timelines and production systems.
Slack makes the counterintuitive claim that 100% utilization is actually a bad thing for production throughput. On the surface, this claim was hard to expect. Isn’t our goal 100% utilization? Isn’t that the hallmark of efficiency?
But thanks to this book I started seeing all the little problems caused by an environment without slack, especially the possibility of burning out my engineers.
It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy At Work
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson, Founders of Basecamp
Recommended: 6 / 10
From the team behind Basecamp, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work is a quick read and brings a few catchphrases that will stick in your mind.
My favorite is that calmness requires owning your own time. That’s actually the essence of slack – having some control over your own time.
Peopleware
Productive Projects and Teams
by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
Recommended: 10 / 10
We all know the advice to get out of peoples’ way and let them do the work. But these platitudes aren’t helpful for engineering managers under a constant time crunch. Peopleware tells you how to make work possible by getting out of the way.
I review my notes on Peopleware every 6 to 12 months – that’s how important this book is to managing software teams.
The Mythical Man Month
Essays on Software Engineering
by Fred P. Brooks, Jr.
Recommended: 9 / 10
Everyone knows you can’t make a baby in one month with nine women – thanks to The Mythical Man Month. But this book has more advice than Brooks’ Law.
The Mythical Man Month will help engineering managers and leaders identify the technical constraints slowing their team down and causing heartburn among their engineers – problems that aren’t obvious on the surface because they live at the intersection of team culture, talent, and code.
Brotopia
Breaking Up the Boys Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang, Journalist; Anchor and Executive Producer of Bloomberg Technology
Recommended: 8 / 10
You might wonder why Brotopia is on this list. Isn’t Brotopia about women in technology? Absolutely.
Women in tech experience much higher churn rates than men and smart engineering managers will investigate why so they can prevent it.
That’s where Brotopia comes in, surfacing factors that cause women to feel burnout and to leave tech, citing both quantitative and qualitative data that I otherwise wouldn’t have exposure to.
