An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management Reviews

• 
  Vicki

  I'm so sad that I can't give this book more stars, particularly since, based on the press around it, the author put a lot of hard work into transitioning this content into a blog, and Stripe Press, the publisher, did a FANTASTIC job rendering it into a physical book that is beautiful to look at and pleasant to hold. Writing books and putting them out into the world is a hard, lonely task.
  
  However, there is too much wrong with it to be able to let the physical manifestation sway over the content:
  
  1. The content was taken from blog posts, and as such, does not form a cohesive narrative, but is instead chapters upon chapters of bite-sized bullets that are hard to remember and don't tie together well.
  2. The organization of the book is strange: it starts off by talking about how many people you should hire if you're managing managers. This is not applicable to most people reading the book, unless you're a c-level exec, and if that's the case, you're definitely not spending time reading this book, you're too busy. Most people come into management through promotion, and have no idea what to do They also don't immediately have the power to hire 8-10 people, or change anything about the team size. I'd have liked to see this book tackle the subject from that approach.
  3. The transition from blog to book is choppy: there are lots of colloquialisms ("ya know?") that don't make sense given how formal and striking the visual layout is. Half of the book seems like formal management speak ("velocity", "prioritization") and half is like the author is talking directly to me about his experiences. I liked the second half.
  4. There are not enough specific examples. It's hard when you can't talk about work you did, but really, that's the only way to get people to connect with what you're talking about. The parts where the author talks about his own experiences are the strongest.
  5. The book is written from the perspective of someone who's worked at high-growth companies (Stripe, Digg, Uber), but it doesn't extrapolate well to larger, slow-moving enterprises. It doesn't have to, but the author makes the implicit assumption that the same strategy that works at these kinds of companies works everywhere. I'd rather hear about his personal experiences.
  6. The illustrations are beautiful but sometimes make no sense whatsoever (maybe outside of the context of the blog?)
  
  That said, there are several good parts:
  
  1. Like I said, the book is GORGEOUS.
  2. There is an excellent appendix of engineering papers, blog posts, and leadership books in the appendix. The author has clearly spent a lot of time studying the subject, and I'd recommend all of these to other readers.
  3. The chapter on how to put presentations for executives, and how to handle the media (aka talking to your suboordinates and peers) is spot-on.
  
  Not a strong recommend from my perspective, but maybe it works for others.
  
• 
  Sebastian Gebski

  One of my 2 favorite books on engineering management written by actual engineering managers ;P not "professional authors" or consultants (the other one is Camille Fournier's one).
  
  There's a lot of goodness covered in a very concise & pragmatic way - focused on principles, not on recipes. The book covers topics like: efficiency, growth, applying systems thinking (in understanding your organization's limitations), strategizing, aspects of product management, long-term evolution (described as "migrations" & org. transformations), career development, recruiting, etc. ...
  
  What I really LOVED is that it's not just generic content filled with obvious "truths" - there are many good observations that could come only out of PRACTICE (I can confirm that using my own past exp.). Read it carefully (it's not that long), pay attention to the comments & I can guarantee you - there will be a-ha moments.
  
  One of appendixes presents the list of book inspirations - I've read plenty of them & I agree with the recommendations. There's one more appendix on whitepapers about tools (architecture-level ones) & frankly - I don't understand its purpose - it doesn't fit this book at all. Pointless.
  
  Anyway, it's a VERY solid book which has actually helped me to reconsider some thoughts & revamp some "narrations" I had around certain concepts. Good stuff.
• 
  Herval Freire

  Beautifully laid out, to the point and no-fluff content.
  Unfortunately, the content itself is formulaic, hard to validate (lots of “trust me, it works”) and dogmatic (the fixation on number of people on teams, for instance, is super odd).
• 
  Jonathan Mckay

  69th book of 2020: An elegant turd.
  

  
  After being in the business of ‘managing’ for about two years, it feels like I’ve learned enough to write a book. I have the scars, fines, and wrecked relationships, to prove the tuition paid for becoming a better manager. Will Larson takes a similar experience at Uber and in ‘An Elegant Puzzle’ actually turns it into a book. Unfortunately, both Will and I have no business writing so much about a subject we know little about.
  

  This isn’t to say that the lessons in the book are wrong, but that they are not presented in a way that is absorbable, or useful to any reader that cannot tie a list of bullet points back to their own experience. The lessons are presented more in a way of ‘here’s how I do things’ without a thoughtful examination of the alternatives and ways in which separate strategies could work. No subject is covered in any reasonable depth, and many of the sections felt like reading a bullet list. The 3 pages spent on what it means to be a PM I found amusing but not informative.
  

  The most memorable takeaway I have is that “A deeply flawed system can't be saved by bandaids, but can easily absorb your happiness to slightly extend its viability.” but you can save yourself a few hours and just read the blog post (
  https://lethain.com/doing-it-harder-a...) itself. The second most useful takeaway was the list of book and paper recommendations. I plan to go read: The Goal, Accelerate, 5 dysfunctions of a team, and will revisit the list of papers if I become more engineering focused.
  

  Yet if the highest recommendation of a book is its bibliography, maybe better to just look elsewhere.
• 
  Diana Pojar

  This is a great resource and contains a lot of useful information for senior ICs and management, but I think it's definitely more tuned towards management / leadership folks. So if you are on that track you should definitely prioritize and read this book, as it has great advice and insights.
  
  Something that I felt the book was lacking was more structure and flow into how the story was said and how all the information was organized.
  
  Overall, a great book that give a wide range on information and insights and I really loved that it mentions different books or resources that focuses in more depth around certain topics! Also, I completely appreciated the list of books and papers recommended at the end!
• 
  Denis Vasilev

  Отличная книга про менеджмент разработки. Огромное количество важного контента по решению практических задач и ответам на сложные вопросы. Широкий перечень знаний по вопросам, которые сложно найти в других книгах по менеджменту в разработке ПО. Поставлю в рекомендованные, думаю лет 5 книга проживет как свежая
• 
  Szymon Kulec

  4 out of 5 - I really liked it.
  
  The book delivers what promises: a brief through various aspects of Engineering Management. It covers different areas of organizations of different sizes. Things that I really liked are the following:
  
  The idea o gelling a team (I don't think I heard it before) as well as reasoning beyond team size (especially, the lower boundary that should be high enough to blend members).
  
  Metrics, baselines, controls, strongly resonate with
  High Output Management. I liked the idea of adding not only a simple value but a description/direction of it.
  
  Role extraction and its introduction to the organization.
  
  The whole book could be a bit longer. Additionally, the addition of nice, but totally unrelated, white papers looks like something added just to make the book longer.
• 
  Matt

  The saying goes "you can't judge a book by its cover." I think that's true. And this book is beautiful.
  
  The quality of the printing of the book is really excellent. Unfortunately, that quality does not fully extend to the content.
  
  My biggest complaint with the book is the faux-scientific graphs that are included. If you were to casually flip through the pages, you might think "wow, there's a lot of data to back up what the author is saying." If you actually read the graphs and associated words, you'll learn that most of these graphs are there to illustrate the author's point and are very infrequently backed by any hard data. For me, that took a lot of the credibility out of the sail.
  
  I'm guessing the author really has learned many hard fought lessons in his career. Dressing those lessons up with charts with no scales to provide the illusion of science left a strong distaste in my mouth by the end of the book.
• 
  Tomasz Onyszko

  First, I have to admit - I like the style of the book: it is dry. There are no analogies, there are no stories about random people repeated 10 times to prove the point and make it stick.
  
  Author provides his experience and receipts to problems he encountered from his perspective and which worked for him. Now - it doesn't mean it will work for you and it is not a recipe book (although content partially is delivered in recipe way "do this in this way, it will work").
  
  Filter it through your lens. Remember - author worked in large engineering organizations.
  
  I found few of topics there very relevant to my current role and my stage in this role. Most likely I will refresh some topics in the future. Also likely that some part I will never use.
  
  Lands on my technical manager/leader bookshelf next to the "The Manager's path".
• 
  Alessandra Anyzewski

  Acho que como primeiro livro de Engineering Management ele satisfez minhas expectativas. São várias regras do nada hehe então ler é um pouco moroso porque as abstrações são muitas e você fica ali procurando exemplos pra aquilo que esta sendo dito. Me fez pensar em muitas más gestões que já vi (e continuo vendo) na minha vida profissional.
  Usarei como handbook, mas não leria de cabo a rabo de novo. Daria de presente pra um EM.
• 
  Vishwanath

  Excellent practical advice from someone who has been in the trenches of managing engineering teams in large and small organizations. Provides a lot of substantial pointers on practical approaches with no fluff. Great reference book for building out ones own “best practices”. The wealth of papers, books and articles referenced all over the book alone was worth the hardcover for me.
• 
  Sérgio Isidoro

  Short, and to the point. Feels like a manual. Probably should be skimmed every 6 months because it's hard to integrate solutions to problems you don't yet have.
• 
  Kristina

  Remarkably practical manual, and not just for engineering management.
• 
  Dmitriy Rozhkov

  No BS actionable book on software engineering management. Although I would appreciate the examples to be more developed in some places, thus 4 stars.
• 
  Sebastian

  Larson's book is concisely and thoughtfully written. I read it with the perspective of an engineer rather than a manager, wanting to better understand what choices my manager may make and the decision tree they might navigate. I came away with a better understanding of my organisation and discussion points I could have with my manager.
  
  The book is written with a clear style in mind as evidenced by the overly-simple diagrams which emphasize a concept, rather than being information dense. Like all Stripe Press books, an Elegant Puzzle is beautiful formatted, a rare delight among good engineering texts.
• 
  Erika RS

  This was a book full of good, practical advice. However, in the end it didn't go beyond beyond a collection of loosely related essays on a myriad of topics. I will give it credit for being a set of tips that is targeted at managers of managers in tech, so in that sense it was quite applicable for me.
  
  The book failed for me though because, ultimately, it was a pile of fish and I wanted to be taught how to fish. The author told the reader his approach to handling leadership challenges. I like his approaches! I'd love to work with Larson. Much of what he has can apply in situations I am in. But in the end, I don't really feel like I know anything more how to be the person who figures out what is needed when the information here isn't quite a right fit. I learned lots of facts. I didn't enrich my mental models. This read like a bunch of (very high quality) blog posts structured into a book. From a book, I want something more.
  
  Still, the advice is good, and I went back and forth between two stars and three. What landed me on two stars was structural. The book often would mention concepts and instead of providing even a brief definition of them would refer to an article online. All of the endnotes were just links (with QR codes, which is useful) and didn't even have the title of the article or book linked which can be extremely useful in determining whether or not to go deeper. It was just persistently annoying enough for me to round down instead of up.
• 
  Max Wolffe

  Phenomenal. Probably the best book on Engineering management I've ever read. This reads a lot like "Hello, Startup" by Yevgeniy Brikman and would be an excellent sequel to it for someone a little further in their career, considering whether management is for them.
  
  I really appreciate the approach, starting with the "Why is this topic important to you" and then going into tactical "Here's how I've approached this, YMMV, but this is the reasoning behind each recommendation".
  
  Recommended for engineering managers or folks who are interested in understanding some theory behind engineering management. Bonus content are some great technical paper recommendations :D
• 
  Mindaugas Mozūras

  As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.
  
  The "An Elegant Puzzle" was crafted by taking blog posts and arranging them into a book. I felt the disjointedness, the chapters and their order didn't always make sense.
  
  Despite how it was arrange, I found a lot of good practical advice in "An Elegant Puzzle". It's worthwhile read. And if not the book, I would recommend to any engineering leader to at least look into Will Larson's blog.
• 
  Lukasz Nalepa

  Pretty straightforward guide for new people that are coming into the role od Engineering Manager or similar. Surprisingly, a mix of high and very low level activities to consider, areas to be watchful of, and considerations to be made. I didn't like it much, as by going into small details sometimes, the author removed the flexibility of this position, focusing on exact definition of the role - and yet, each company, especially outside of Silicon Valley does understand Engineering Management roles a bit differently with emphasis on different aspects.
• 
  Adam Schuck

  Pragmatic, opinionated approaches to engineering management, with a strong bias towards systems thinking. Early sections on team growth and evolution were particularly useful.
• 
  Manas Saloi

  One of the most practical books out there on Engineering management.
• 
  Héctor Iván Patricio Moreno

  Primero: esto no es un libro convencional sino una colección de entradas de blog ordenadas en 5 grandes áreas que conciernen a organizaciones con cientos de personas en el área de desarrollo atendiendo a millones o miles de millones de usuarios.
  
  Este libro y lo que recomienda esta muy arriba de mi nivel en cuanto a lo profesional, no creo enfrentarme a los problemas que menciona aquí en varios años, como ser el responsable de una organización con decenas o cientos de equipos. Si estás a ese nivel o quiere avanzar a ese nivel de reponsabilidad, creo que es una lectura imperdible, ya que habla de problemas concretos que el autor ha tenido y da soluciones prácticas.
  
  Más allá de los problemas que aún no tengo, da muchas pistas acerca de cómo debería trabajar una organización en la que el software es el tema central y se aprenden cosas concretas sobre liderazgo. Aquí hay están algunas de las cosas que me llevo del libro:
  
  1) Si aspiras a ser un administrador de ingeniería, ¿estás dispuesto/a a hacer las tareas de las que habla ahí? ¿Disfutarías de tareas como administración de equipos, manejo de conflictos, creación de estructuras organizacionales?
  
  2) Toda organización, independientemente del tamaño debe ofrecer una estructura a sus empleados: una forma de crecer en tu carrera (career lader), un puesto bien definido y procesos.
  
  3) La cultura de la empresa está formada por procesos.
  
  4) Debes tener una mentalidad de ver las organizaciones como sistemas (system thinking) para poder crear procesos efectivos.
  
  5) Los resultados importantes toman tiempo, siempre debes planear pensando en el largo plazo.
  
  6) La cultura de la empresa es lo que haces, no lo que dices, los resultados gritan más fuerte que cualquier proclamación.
  
  Se me hace muy interesante el nivel de pensamiento que debes tener para estar en un puesto de esta responsabilidad. Finalmente, la lista de lecturas recomendadas y de papers está increíble. Si tienes la oportundad de ciomprarlo en físico, hazlo, ya que la encuadernación e impresión son hermosas, pero la portada blanca se ensucia muy fácil ya que no está plastificada.
  
• 
  Vitor Capela

  The book has many insights, especially for organizations going through rapid growth. If you're a direct manager, it's good to be aware that a lot of what's discussed is pertinent to roles a few levels above — those responsible for managing managers and defining company-wide processes.
  
  I happen to be in a software company going through hypergrowth, and it was interesting to recognize many of the stages we've left behind, as well as reading descriptions of the vicissitudes of our current solutions. Will's practical, point by point solutions, make them seem surmountable.
  
  The main issue with it it's that it's repetitive, and a little bit formulaic. Combined with the correct, but only so, prose, it becomes a little tedious, and it's hard to pick out what's valuable from what's only filler. Still, I found it valuable as a description of what big companies go through.
• 
  Scott Maclellan

  A strong perspective on the fine art of management. Having been hooked on Will's talks, blog and newsletter I wanted more.
  
  Covers a wide variety of topics directly from the blog. Want to shape your career? How should you size teams? Structure an amazing hiring pipeline! The writing style is easy to digest and approachable. Most topics are advice gained over many attempts.
  
  There is a strong systems thinking aspect throughout the book. What is the system being reviewed and how do you systematically optimize it. I love it! This leaves every section feeling like you have been handed the secrets to how everything works.
  
  The context can be lost a little. Looking at his job history there are a few different companies and cultures represented. Consider how that applies to your world.
  
  Would highly recommend.
• 
  Billie

  I find Business books fall into two categories, psychological research then applied to business, or a group of tactics from a particular persons experience.
  
  This is the latter, and because of it, if your organisations aren't like the organisations of the author, you might struggle to apply these.
  
  Having said that, of the books I have read that are like that, this is by far the best, and takes a kind, learning and systems thinking based approach to most of the tactics described within.
  
  The advice is practical and I can see myself using it as a reference. As it's from a collection of blog posts I would recommend treating each part as a single isolated unit, rather than viewing the work as whole.
• 
  Julian

  Kind of scattered, in terms of topics and especially their applicability -- there's some reasonable small company advice, some decent large company advice, and lots of rapidly-growing-company advice. This latter case is probably where this book is most useful. I tended to agree with everything said, which makes it hard for me to evaluate if the writing here is going to change anyone's mind, but generally gives me a positive feeling about the book.
  
  Actually, probably the biggest thing this book changed my mind on was consistent application of policy, and the value of defining career ladders in terms of how it affects your hiring process, which is something I hadn't thought much about before.
  
  Most unexpected part: there's a Papers We Love-style reading list at the end.
• 
  Scott Wozniak

  This is a management manual for software company managers. The examples and tactics are all focused on that space, so if that’s you, this could be one of the best management books you have read. If you are a leader in a different space then still 2/3 of the book applies.
  
  It’s clear, practical and empty of all fluff. In fact, for the first time in years I would like the book author to flesh out the ideas a little more (most add so much fluff).
  
  It covers everything from performance rating systems to technical debt to handling hiring super fast to mapping your overall career in Silicon Valley.
• 
  Lampros Pappas

  This read may sometimes seem a bit dogmatic, particularly when an attempt to define a framework of thought is made. Most of the content is based on the author's blog and reflects his experience from growing companies and startups. The most powerful feature of this book is that the author gives concise advice on handling several circumstances and challenges while providing lots of references to other books, blog posts and papers. The Appendix is very detailed and it's a very good reason to recommend the book to fresh and seasoned engineering managers.
• 
  Tomek

  I do not aspire to be a manager, however I wanted to read this book. I wanted to get to know what type of problems you might face as a manager.
  Despite this, the book was useful for me. I am always allowed suggesting how we can improve our processes and what we should change.
  If you are a manager, I would recommend this book to you; if you are not you also should read this book. You do not have to read the whole content (some subchapters are written precisely for managers), but after reading you should know better why some actions had been executed, why some operations are necessary, and the most important: how to get along with your manager.