Josip Saban

Engineering manager's guide Josip Saban

This book will help you become a better manager. Across the years, we have constantly been gaining experience in writing software, but still, projects are late and people turnover is high. So, it becomes obvious that most problems occur not because we don't know how to develop software, but because we are not good at developing and managing people. Computers don't create software, people do - we need to help more people succeed and good managers can solve this problem. One of the worst things that frequently happens, no matter how many times it backfires, is that people are being thrown into management without any plan or preparation. Unlike our software creation skills, which have been developed over decades of academic and practical learning, we don't learn about management until we enter the industry and see other people do it. It usually begins with an internal job opening in one of the teams, and very often the choice is forced upon us as the only way to progress our careers or "we will get stuck in operations forever". This means that we haven't had enough preparation, we haven't done any formal education, and we haven't got much of an idea about what we should be doing as managers. This book tries to help you handle these situations. It is a step-by-step guide on how to become a good engineering manager, who will deliver software on time and be respected and admired by people. You got your first role of managing a team, either by internal promotion or by external recruitment and now a very big thing is in front of you - "day one". It is the morning of your first working day on a new position with a new team. You need to understand your new role and find out who is in your new team, what they do, and how they relate to the rest of the organization. You will go through all of these topics, and much more, hopefully learn how to become a better manager and a better person.