The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact

The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact

<p>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. <p>They've internalized a mindset that took me <u>years</u> 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. <p>Introducing <i>The Effective Engineer</i> €" the <u>only</u> 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. <p>For two years, I embarked on a quest seeking an answer to one question: <p><b>How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?</b> <p>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. <p>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. <p>This is just a small sampling of the hard questions I posed to them: <ul> <li>What engineering qualities correlate with future success? <li>What have you done that has paid off the highest returns? <li>What separates the most effective engineers you've worked with from everyone else? <li>What's the most valuable lesson your team has learned in the past year? <li>What advice do you give to new engineers on your team? </ul> <p>Everyone's story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes. <p>You'll get to hear stories like: <ul> <li>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? <li>How and why did Quora deploy code to production 40 to 50 times per day? <li>How did the team behind Google Docs become the fastest acquisition to rewrite its software to run on Google's infrastructure? <li>How does Etsy use continuous experimentation to design features that are <i>guaranteed</i> to increase revenue at launch? <li>How did Facebook's small infrastructure team effectively operate thousands of database servers? <li>How did Dropbox go from barely hiring any new engineers to nearly tripling its team size year-over-year? </ul> <p>What's more, I've distilled their stories into <u>actionable habits and lessons</u> that you can follow step-by-step to make your career and your team more successful. <p><b>The skills used by effective engineers are all learnable.</b> <p>And I'll teach them to you. With <i>The Effective Engineer</i>, I'll teach you a unifying framework called <u>leverage</u> €" the value produced per unit of time invested €" that you can use to identify the activities that produce disproportionate results. <p><b>Here's a sneak peek at some of the lessons you'll learn.</b> You'll learn how to: <ul> <li>Prioritize the right projects and tasks to increase your impact. <li>Earn more leeway from your peers and managers on your projects. <li>Spend less time <i>maintaining</i> and <i>fixing</i> software and more time <i>building</i> and <i>shipping</i> new features. <li>Produce more accurate software estimates. <li>Validate your ideas cheaply to reduce wasted work. <li>Navigate organizational and people-related bottlenecks. <li>Find the appropriate level of code reviews, testing, abstraction, and technical debt to balance speed and quality. <li>Shorten your debugging workflow to increase your iteration speed. <li>Use metrics to quantify your impact and consistently make progress. </ul>