The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact 1st Edition by Edmond Lau (PDF)

Description

The most effective engineers — the ones who have risen to become distinguished engineers and leaders at their companies — can produce 10 times the impact of other engineers, but they’re not working 10 times the hours. They’ve internalized a mindset that took me years of trial and error to figure out. I’m going to share that mindset with you — along with hundreds of actionable techniques and proven habits — so you can shortcut those years. Introducing The Effective Engineer — the only book designed specifically for today’s software engineers, based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at top tech companies, and packed with hundreds of techniques to accelerate your career. For two years, I embarked on a quest seeking an answer to one question: How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?I interviewed and collected stories from engineering VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders at today’s top software companies: established, household names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; rapidly growing mid-sized companies like Dropbox, Square, Box, Airbnb, and Etsy; and startups like Reddit, Stripe, Instagram, and Lyft. These leaders shared stories about the most valuable insights they’ve learned and the most common and costly mistakes that they’ve seen engineers — sometimes themselves — make. This is just a small sampling of the hard questions I posed to them: What engineering qualities correlate with future success? What have you done that has paid off the highest returns? What separates the most effective engineers you’ve worked with from everyone else? What’s the most valuable lesson your team has learned in the past year? What advice do you give to new engineers on your team? Everyone’s story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes. You’ll get to hear stories like: How did Instagram’s team of 5 engineers build and support a service that grew to over 40 million users by the time the company was acquired? How and why did Quora deploy code to production 40 to 50 times per day? How did the team behind Google Docs become the fastest acquisition to rewrite its software to run on Google’s infrastructure? How does Etsy use continuous experimentation to design features that are guaranteed to increase revenue at launch? How did Facebook’s small infrastructure team effectively operate thousands of database servers? How did Dropbox go from barely hiring any new engineers to nearly tripling its team size year-over-year? What’s more, I’ve distilled their stories into actionable habits and lessons that you can follow step-by-step to make your career and your team more successful. The skills used by effective engineers are all learnable.And I’ll teach them to you. With The Effective Engineer, I’ll teach you a unifying framework called leverage — the value produced per unit of time invested — that you can use to identify the activities that produce disproportionate results. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the lessons you’ll learn. You’ll learn how to: Prioritize the right projects and tasks to increase your impact. Earn more leeway from your peers and managers on your projects. Spend less time maintaining and fixing software and more time building and shipping new features. Produce more accurate software estimates. Validate your ideas cheaply to reduce wasted work. Navigate organizational and people-related bottlenecks. Find the appropriate level of code reviews, testing, abstraction, and technical debt to balance speed and quality. Shorten your debugging workflow to increase your iteration speed. Use metrics to quantify your impact and consistently make progress.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”- Raffi Krikorian, Former Engineering VP at Twitter “I hope more people embrace Edmond’s philosophy and techniques to make their companies and careers more successful.”- Bret Taylor, CEO of Quip & Former CTO of Facebook”A computer science degree teaches you how software works, but doesn’t teach you how to work as a software engineer. This book bridges the gap, teaching you the lessons that it normally takes years to master.”- Zach Brock, Engineering Manager at Square “The Effective Engineer walks you through the critical best practices — from goal setting, to prioritization, to making data-driven decisions — that can increase the results of your efforts and the subsequent value of your work.”- Tamar Bercovici, Senior Engineering Manager at Box”I’m a big believer in learning by just doing and don’t typically buy into self-help style books. However, I worked with Edmond side-by-side in my first job and learned a tremendous amount from him. I was eager to read this book and found lots of new and actionable lessons. Many of the techniques on time management and leverage would’ve saved me countless hours in the past.”- Ilya Sukhar, Co-Founder and CEO of Parse (acquired by Facebook)”I’d always thought that good engineers were born of long, hard experience, so I didn’t think a book could teach me how to be more effective. But in fact, Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices. There is a world of difference between a great engineering team and good engineering team, and this book will help you bridge that gap.”- Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google”The Effective Engineer is a comprehensive tour of our industry’s collective wisdom written with clarity. Almost every engineer starting at Asana makes at least one substantial mistake that might have been avoided if they internalized what’s written in this book. I’m recommending it to the whole Asana engineering org.”- Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana About the Author For the past decade, Edmond Lau has worked as a software engineer in some of the top technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Ooyala, Quora, and Quip. He’s passionate about building great engineering teams, and he’s interviewed over 500+ engineering candidates throughout his career as well as spoken to teams across the country on how to build great engineering cultures. At Quora, he built out the onboarding and mentoring programs used to train dozens of new engineering hires. His engineering and career advice has been featured on Forbes, Time, Slate, Inc., and Fortune. He’s also guest lectured at both MIT and Stanford on software design. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Computer Science from MIT.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Right after graduating from university with a CS degree in the summer of 2018, I landed my first programming job at an early-stage, seed startup. It’s 2020, and I’m still working there as of this writing, but despite the myriads of projects I’ve worked on and the many hats I had to wear, only recently have I started to ask myself these questions:- How much have I grown as an engineer?- What kind of impact have I made?- Am I proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish?- Based on what I’m doing now, what does my career trajectory look like, within the company or elsewhere should I switch jobs?I wasn’t quite satisfied with my personal answers, which made me realize that I needed to understand what is the role of an engineer and what differentiates a standout engineer from an average one.That led me to this book. Edmond Lau’s varied experience in the tech industry, especially his time at Quora while it was an early-stage venture, deeply resonated with me. I saw that he was in my shoes before and yet was not discouraged by the circumstances of having to build a system from the ground-up. Instead, he took on the challenge with enthusiasm, made an indelible impact, and provided tremendous value from both an engineering and business perspective. Understanding how he was able to do that as well as the why is the purpose of this remarkable book, and as a result, I developed a framework that I look forward to applying consistently to help my company succeed.Highly recommended to any engineer who desires to make a real impact at his or her workplace!

⭐Does a good job of calling out all the important things an effective engineer exhibits.

⭐It’s called “the effective engineer” but it can be really useful for everyone involved in the software product building process.The first main concept of the book is that you should be always analyzing what is the most impactful thing you can do, and focus on doing it.There is a lot of advice on the right mindset when working, organizing teams, planning, doing the right thing for the product at the right time, etc.It’s short, it’s on point, and I highly recommend it, especially, but not exclusively, to software engineers.

⭐This is by far one of the best books I’ve read on being effective. I’ve talked so much about it to others that they want to buy a copy. A manager at my work was completely impressed when I was describing how I was implementing it at work. He even said that we need more people like me. My niece who is a high school student told me that she wants to read it. One of my wife’s friends who is also an engineer was in awe when I described the contents of the book.

⭐I reread this book recently because it made such an impact on me the first time. This book changed how I approach problems and prioritize work. I’ve recommended it to everyone I work with.

⭐This book will show you a bunch of examples on how things work in software engineering, but I’d shrink it a little and organize a little bit different way.

⭐Must read for a new engineer. Great examples and a fun read.

⭐Guys, let me share this with you, this book is good, really good. Of course there are other books that may have some similar content but I should say that it is super good for starters. This book, should not be kept aside after reading it, but use it like using a dictionary for referencing. Edmond Lau in his book, really indeed set a pathway for all starters for success but only for those who decided to put it into practice.

⭐I’m a software dev. Working for 10 years now. This book should really have been about 50 pages max. It’s has been really dragged out. It’s not bullet poinit information – as any engineer or software developer would appreciate.The statements are just so obvious – but without the “wow, I always knew that, but have never been able to put it into words” effect. It’s just, “yes, that’s obvious, next page…”

⭐It is a great book full of practical advice on how to get more done as a software developer. In fact, it is one of the three books I think all programmers would benefit from reading (the other two are Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer). Full review available at my blog.

⭐Lots of truths, I recommend it.

⭐I’m a software eng with 3 years of experience, having worked for Amazon, Snapchat, one very legit startup and now Google. This book is basically relaying all of the engineering culture and norms from successful startups and big companies. I think the book does an excellent job of conveying the tools used by successful organizations, but I didn’t find the information particularly insightful or novel compared to what I’ve been exposed to in my day to day work.I think the advice in this book is good, but don’t think it merits the price.

⭐I bought this book out of curiosity, as the people I follow on twitter mentioned it: I was not disappointed, and I enjoyed reading this book, I recommend it.I was not expecting an Holy Grail or “revelation” of how to be an effective engineer/person, because in fact what I found in the book are all well grounded concepts and reasonable advices. What I found helpful however was those general concepts explained and discussed in the context of engineering.Here is what I enjoyed the most of this book: it was like I could have a nice conversation and sharing of experiences with another engineer, and I’ve grown especial admiration for the way concepts have been presented and discussed spot-on in the context of engineering.

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