Building Great Software Engineering Teams: Recruiting, Hiring, and Managing Your Team from Startup to Success

by Josh Tyler

Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment. With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success. Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience. In this book you’ll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you’ll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team. The primary audience is engineering leaders, startup founders, CTOs, and others tasked with building an engineering team to fulfill their company’s mission. The secondary audience is any engineering manager or senior engineer interested in learning more about how to hire or manage engineers effectively.

Genres: Management, Leadership, Business, Programming, Nonfiction, Entrepreneurship, Technology

170 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 29, 2015

Reviews

[Chris Gorgolewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent advice

The book has some good points, but many of them are repeated multiple times. Disproportionately large chunk is spent on recruiting and hiring and very little on actual managing. Difficult topics such as correcting employee behavior and letting people go have not been covered extensively.

[Edwin Dalorzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like learning from a masterful teacher

This book is, without a doubt, one of the best I've read this year on this subject. I felt like a pearl hunter every time I took a dive into its pages. Every few paragraphs I came up with one or more valuable pearls of wisdom. There is no denying that the author is a very experienced engineering manager, and reading this book is like seating to talk with a wise and humble teacher. Whoever finishes this book having learned a thing or two from its pages will have to admit, like me, that this book has made them better.

[Natansh Dubey · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best piece on management of engineering teams, I ever read.
The book is intended towards engineers, engineering leads, technical managers and engineering teams in general but reading it from an HR perspective was no less captivating.
The author, Josh has touched some of the very minute corners underlying career transitions, career progressions, dilemmas of manager and associates promoted as managers and has indeed displayed fine engineering craftwork in writing this beautiful literature altogether. I strongly recommend this book, not just for engineering teams but also for HR professionals in IT Industry (Ever folks from non IT will find some chapters, extremely relevant, though not all)
Some words of wisdom from the book:

1. In truth, promotions are usually given to people who are already fulfilling the
duties of that larger role, and haven’t yet been recognized formally for doing
so. The promotion is more of a reflection of reality.

2. Teams have gravitated toward algorithmic questions because they lend themselves more readily to a mathematical, empirical comparison of candidates. By
measuring runtime complexity, time to complete a task, lines of code written,
or bug rate, for example, you can decide whether someone is 10 times better
in this dimension. The danger is in extrapolating this thinking to also decide
that they’re 10 times better as an engineer, overall.

3. You Care About Accomplishments More
Than Friendships
In many ways, being a manager is a lonely job..

The book is broadly divided in 3 sections, where each section is meticulously expressed with same engineering mind precision, however, I personally liked the last one (Managing your team) the most.
Great work, rarely do I rate 5 stars for a book but this deserves it all...

[Scott Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Building excellent software is an intricate task that requires a great deal of technical expertise. Managing people who build software is also an intricate task, but the required skillset is different. A manager has to be a good enough developer to be respected, but she/he must also have “soft skills” to finesse interpersonal situations. Instead of a technical challenge, management becomes a way of life and leading. With a particular focus on software engineering, Josh Tyler lends his guidance about building these qualities in one’s self.

At the time of this writing, Tyler himself is a VP of Engineering at a mid-size company building educational software. His daily challenges are recruiting top talent, getting the right fits hired, and then managing them into successful roles. Each of these tasks have distinct pitfalls, and any competent leader needs to learn from the mistakes of others before making her/his own. Tyler is transparent about the skills that he has learned and the mindset he carries into his tasks.

At 150 pages, this book is incredibly concise. It does not waste readers’ time by expansively approaching a topic. That is its strength… and its weakness. It would be nice to explore a particular topic in more depth, but Tyler prefers to mentor readers in how to do his entire job well, not just one component. It took me only a few evenings to read, but I am left wanting more depth. I suppose its depth lies in being about the field of software engineering, not any one area of management.

In my judgment, this book is more geared to managers just starting out and those in a mid-level. Experienced managers might pick up a thing or two, but given limited time, they will likely benefit more from an in-depth exploration of a particular topic. Software management itself is complex and worthy of focused treatments like this, and Tyler does pull off a good job at describing what’s needed. At times, it just would have been nice to go into more depth instead of moving to the next topic.

[Evangelos Krikelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great information for the hiring process and the role of a manager in engineering teams. Some thinks may sound simple or self-evident but the book provides a whole strategy on how to acquire and manage the people you need in your company. It is ideal for both managers in their early years and people that will get involved in an interview. Technical people will love the way it is structured.

[Alexey Ivakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and straight to the point. Tightly packed with information. To see the precise distinction between engineering and managerial career path is refreshing. I definitely got something to think of and to try with my team from this book.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't find anything in this book that I didn't know, but it is a book I'll recommend to new engineering managers.

It isn't perfect, but it has a number of non-obvious insights that I've learned through experience.

[Dmitry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stuff they don't teach you in MBA.
Really hands-on experience of building software engineering teams in Silicon Valley

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good ideas, but very repetitive.
Also too focused on the US market.

[Eric Jain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Covers all the basics of recruiting and hiring, and clears up misconceptions about common practices and roles.