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9 books that helped me navigate my first time being a tech lead

Danny Perez on December 12, 2018

The tech lead was moving to another team for a long-term assignment, and I took over as the engineering manager/team lead. From the outside, the te...
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Carlos • Edited

"When am i supposed to code if I'm stuck in meetings and dealing with people all the time?" I feel you man... this part sucks hard time. Lately I find myself investing time outside normal working hours just to do some catch up but at the end of the day feels useless and frustration won’t stop. There’s always more to do.
I will take a look at those books! Thank you!

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Danny Perez

Been there. Done that. And seen manager managers burn out after being there and doing just that. Sneaking a few hours at night or on the weekends just to get that feeling of being productive.

All too often it might feel like time spent managing isn't time well spent at all - despite that being our job. There's a balance to strike though, and hopefully you figure it out sooner rather than later.

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teachingtechleads

Hey Carlos, I fell down that hole at my last company. 70 hour weeks became the norm and my family took the brunt of it. It's not worth it.

The biggest thing that I had to learn how to do was to say 'no' to meetings that weren't absolutely necessary. It's a tough lesson, but it saves you in the long run.

And then there's finding the time to code inside the usual 40 hour work week that we should strive to keep. Well, I just put together a post on that topic. Hopefully you can take something away from it!

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Max Ong Zong Bao

This is really a nice collection of books will be my goto books to read :) I came across this 1 which is really awesome that talks about building a culture and communication

Debugging Teams by Brian Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

shop.oreilly.com/product/063692004...

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Danny Perez

Debugging Teams was one of my favorites!

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SCHREIBER Christophe

Thanks for the reading list ! I'm gonna have the role of tech lead for the first time soon, it will surely help me.
I'm currently reading "Becoming a Technical Leader" from Gerald M. Weinberg (leanpub.com/becomingatechnicalleader), it's very interesting too.

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Danny Perez

That's exciting! Looks like you're off to a great start. Going to have to check that one out myself.

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Kyle Stephens

Sneaky referral codes in the URLs. Sly dog ;) :) :)

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Danny Perez

Thanks for commenting! I had meant to leave all the links to Amazon as plain links. I've updated the article to remove the referral codes and added a disclaimer as well.

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Sandor Dargo

To me it's fine. I won't pay more if you put here a referral link and at least you receive something back for your efforts.

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Ashwin Vaswani

Awesome resource! Looks like I have my reading material for the new year 😊

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Jacob

If you could only recommend 2 or 1 which would you choose?
(I'm not going to add 9 non-fiction books to my queue all at once)

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Danny Perez

If you're already facing some issues on your team, read Debugging Teams.

If you're struggling with giving useful feedback to your team, read Radical Candor.

If you just want to know how other people deal with their job as Tech Leads, then read Talking with Tech Leads by Patrick Kua (or just watch one of his talks like What I Wish I Knew as a First Time Tech Lead) for a low commitment alternative.

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teachingtechleads

Danny, this is a great list! I've only read a few of the titles on here but definitely am going to start up an amazon wishlist to start writing expense reports against after this one.

Thanks!