My Expectations
I decided to pick up this book for a couple of reasons. I’ve always been looking for a description of what a manager does, or should do, at tech companies. I’ve personally worked with a couple of managers so far, and each of them manage with distinctive styles, that I find myself agree/disagree with. I’d like to have a set of basic expectations for managers, and learn to understand things from the management’s side. Another reason that I got into this book was to learn the scope of the game I play – something like a tutorial/how to guide when I try out a new game and start exploring. More specifically I was looking for how the career ladders are set up in tech companies, what options I have at each point in my career, and subsequently what I can do to prepare for these choices when the time comes. (For some reason I feel like I should have already known all this by now, just by interacting with peers and managers in the workplace. But still I want to verify that this applies to the entire industry.)
After reading the book I ended up getting most of my questions answered. What I like about this book is that the author doesn’t assume the readers know about what it means to hold a certain title. For every career level, the book always starts with an explanation of responsibilities the title bears, and contrasts it with some similar titles across the industry.
A Summary
Contrary to what I used to assume, management doesn’t start with holding the manager’s title – it starts way earlier than that, the moment that an individual contributor(IC) shows influence on other ICs. In fact, even if you plan to stay in the IC track, you’re still expected to exhibit major leadership as you rise in seniority. The book is structured to capture this entire process, corresponding to the career ladder of tech companies. It gathers definitions and advice about all levels of management, from the mentor, the tech lead, the manager, the director, to the VP/CTO. The author herself started from a junior developer and rose to the CTO of a startup, so the book is packed with tips and advice from her own experience with the various roles, as well as from her interactions with people holding these roles. At the end of the book, there’s also a chapter about engineering culture.
Comments
I’m impressed with how much detail the book goes into about how to lead. For each career level, the book enumerates all kinds of situations/scenarios that a newbie might be dealing with, and provides hands-on tips about how to resolve those issues. For example, the book provides several explicit dos and don’ts when delivering bad news to teams they manage: don’t blast it out in a large group, do talk to the difficult individuals first, do find someone else to deliver the message if you can’t stand behind the it, do be honest about the likely outcomes, and do think about how you would like to be told. Most of these tips intuitively sounds like common sense when you hear them, but they really make explicit about how best to handle this challenging situation. In fact, I find the book mirrors my own experience – it explicitly explains all kinds of traits I see from good leaders that I’ve had the opportunity to work with so far.
This book does not teach you anything about skills of leadership, communication or negotiation. I remember being told that leadership and leadership opportunities are not granted, but “grabbed”, meaning that you need to act like a leader for a while (usually a couple of months) before actually being promoted to that position. I think this process of upward struggle is where the book falls short. Or you could say the book might have intentionally left out these efforts, since it doesn’t intend to focus on how to get yourself promoted. However this is only my first book about management, and I’m sure there are materials/tips out there that talk about this.
The #1 Takeaway
If there’s one thing I’d take away with this book, it would be “be curious”. The book doesn’t stress this point too much, but throughout the author’s narrative, I could see this being one of her motivations to push through/excel in her various positions. All these advices from the book – be kind not nice, be analytical about debugging teams, don’t be afraid – they come from an inherit drive to figure out why, and do the right things. This resonates with me because I like to work with passionate people, who are driven by their own will to do what they believe in. Not the responsibilities pushed upon them, nor the hope to please everyone, nor the enjoyment of commanding power that comes with management titles.
Concluding – The Manager’s Path is a book that I’ll probably keep with me, so that I can go back periodically to remind myself of those tips working with and leading different types of people in my job. I’m fascinated by the intricacies of the leadership roles, and I’m inspired by how people problems can be approached and solved with the techniques described by the book. I’d also recommend this book to anyone in their early career in the tech industry to demystify what managers do, and why they’re doing what they do.