Will Larson

This is really not how most companies think about it. Unless you take an extremely broad view of what “management” is.

As a term of art, used by people writing the JDs for “manager” jobs (source: have wrote those JDs), it specifically means having people reporting to you, being responsible for their productivity, growth, and development.

The senior IC track does not (have to) involve management. It does involve a lot of communication, collaboration, and coordination, which may look like management if you squint. And there is overlap; in small companies, particularly startups, sometimes tech lead and manager hats are worn by the same person. But they are different roles.

And particularly, to the point of the article, they are different career tracks. You might wear both hats for a bit, but most careers will end up specializing on one or other track.

See https://lethain.com/ for lots of material on what it means to be a staff-plus IC, as well as engineering manager.

For reading, I'd recommend everything from Will Larson ( https://lethain.com ).

As for attitude and behaviours for making the jump, it's a combination of actively looking for opportunities (that's the easy part), and positioning yourself as someone who is an obvious choice for such a position, which is basically when you consistently have an attitude and reputation of total ownership, supporting others, never complaining or taking it easy and instead always thinking and delivering at a wider scope, being the person people come to for making a decision on what and how to do, rather than a person who is being told what and how to do.

Some people do all of that naturally. Lucky them. Others don't, and it's a journey to adjust. You don't need to be a "natural", but if you aren't you need to learn to behave like one before you can credibly go into a leadership position.

Personally, I would recommend listening to Thoughtworks' Techonology Podcast. Their approach in general to running in the cloud is a pretty good one, which I'd characterize as platform engineering-centric. Anything Will Larsen writes is bound to be worth looking at and thinking about in the context of scaling cloud operations and operational complexity. His concept of the 'pierceable abstraction' is _absolutely key_ in my opinion.
Additionally, the following blog posts are fairly good introductions:

https://charity.wtf/2018/10/24/ten-platform-commandments/

https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html

https://lethain.com/pierceable-abstractions/

https://srvaroa.github.io/paas/infrastructure/platform/kubernetes/cloud/2020/01/02/talk-how-to-build-a-paas-for-1500-engineers.html

Hope that helps - had to dash this off fairly quickly.

> Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.

Or doors.

25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door".

In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track.

The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ...

Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters.

// See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/

This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in:

- https://erikbern.com

- https://lethain.com

- https://commoncog.com

- https://scattered-thoughts.net

- https://danluu.com

- https://ideolalia.com

- https://staysaasy.com

- https://collabfund.com

- https://blog.nelhage.com

- https://jacobian.org

- https://equalventures.substack.com

- https://defmacro.org

- https://spakhm.com

- https://apenwarr.ca

- https://scarletink.com

- https://benkuhn.net

- https://cpojer.net

- https://brandur.org

- https://zeptonaut.com

Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!

"An Elegant Puzzle" by Will Larson[0] is revelatory when it comes to leading a software engineering team. There is a solution to every organizational problem I've encountered in companies from single digits to thousands. That book alone, along with its intentional and organized bibliography is one of the best investments you can make in a tech career. Even without context on the size of your company, Larson's new "The Engineering Executive's Primer"[1] will surely make a valuable introduction too.

[0] https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle [1] https://lethain.com/eng-execs-primer/