Sometimes you buy a book and then don’t read it straight away. In fact, I spend most of my time buying books and not reading them either at all or at an undisclosed time in the future.
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management is one of those books. I bought it a year ago from Amazon on Kindle and read some of it, took issue with some of the language it used and it’s seemingly narrow context, and then almost forgot about it. I dismissed it as being irrelevant even though I’m always thinking and opining about engineering management myself.
And then, the other day, I rediscovered it. I re-read some small parts and realised how some parts of it are really well thought out and well-constructed. Perhaps also, I realised that the parts I didn’t like were amplified by the VC or post-VC world it was born into. Because it’s at once both humble and entitled in its opinions. It’s a grab bag of thoughts from important texts which sometimes is wildly inaccurate or unhelpful, and sometimes right on the mark. In fact, it’s like management itself – usually wrong but can we done with a light touch to make it seem more palatable.
It’s also stuffed full of the kind of language you’ll need to get used to if you want to be a manager in any of the Unicorn firms or, indeed, any scale-up wannabe. Because this is a book for managers who have to deal with SLOs and OKRs and reorgs and migrations and all those types of things which are just fancy ways of balancing change and cost.
Where the book works best is in the lightest touch areas. For example in the Preface it says this:
“The first blog post I ever wrote was on April 7, 2007, and was titled “Finding Our Programming Flow”. It was not very good.”
“It took 200 more posts and another decade to cobble together a written voice and to make enough mistakes that my experience might become reading.”
This is a good way to win over a reader. Especially a reader like me who also fancies themselves as a writer on engineering and engineering management topics. As a leader, you have to be able to write and blogging is the number one tool I use to find my voice and find my thoughts.
A quick look at the table of contents convinced me of this book’s relevance in some areas. With sections called Organization, Tools, Approaches, Cultures, Careers, Tackling subjects such as team sizing, team first thinking, use of process as ‘quick fix’ and organizational changes as ‘slower fixes’ and then culture I guess as also a slow fix.
A Book of Parts
The book is most certainly a collection of blog posts. It repeats itself. It jumps around. It’s opinionated. But in this scattergun approach it does cover all the bases well. If you can read through the voice of a busy manager – one who is anxious to share his knowledge as quickly as possible
It name-checks some famous books: The Goal by Eli Goldratt. Thinking in Systems a Primer by Donella H. Meadows. Accelerate by Forsgren, Kim and Humble.
The whole thing feels like it’s informed by a past era. It has been influenced by venture capital investment, where engineering is done ‘by the numbers’ in a pretty expensive way. Expensive engineers, expensive habits, named ways of doing things. We must give everything we do and everyone we work with a title.
Despite the book’s claims otherwise, this is a manual for the engineering manager. You can read it and lean on it for engineering knowledge. And for that alone, it’s invaluable. If you land yourself in a management position (and if god-forbid I ever do again) then use this book as a resource for what you need to know, when you need to know it.
This is not an elegant puzzle. It’s a huge stack of useful engineering management blogs and thought pieces pushed together into a single package. Use it as such because this is gold there but let’s not pretend this is art or elegant. This is advice by the bucketload and a bargain to boot but take the advice with a pinch of salt and use it in your own context.
As one Amazon review puts it:
“Overall, the book was interesting to read but I sure hope that future managers will not copy from Will, blindly.”