Julie Zhuo, a product design executive formerly at Facebook, writes about management, design, and working with engineers.
HN commenters recommend her posts on being strategic and on management, and link her piece on Origami for Quartz Composer.
This is great: "If you’re a manager and care seriously about speed, you’ll need to tell your people you’re wiling to accept the tradeoffs. Reid did this with me. We agreed I was going to make judgment calls on a range of issues on his behalf without checking with him. He told me, “In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10-20% — times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation – if it means you can move fast.” I felt empowered to make decisions with this ratio in mind—and it was incredibly liberating.""
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> 2. The best way to get a powerful person’s attention: offer to help them.
This is entirely consistent with what Sheryl Sandberg said at HBS's commencement in 2012. [1]
"When I was first at Facebook, a woman named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her kind of socially. And she called me and said, I want to talk with you about coming to work with you at Facebook. So I thought about calling you, she said, and telling you all the things I’m good at and all the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it. My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always about the job searcher, but not in Laurie’s case. I said, you’re…
There are many more jobs as programmer than as CTO/CIO/VP. Furthermore, what makes you think that you would be as good at politics as you are at coding? People in management positions are often in competition with each other on a kill or be killed basis. OK, not that extreme but you get the idea. Politics is important in that game.
There was also an interesting post on HN a few days ago about the hurdles of management: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/unintuitive-things-i-ve-learned-about-management-f2c42d68604b
Number one point from that post: "Imagine you spend a full day in back-to-back 1:1s talking to people. Does that sound awful or awesome?" If the answer is not and "long for the days when you were able to manipulate something directly — pixels, words, lines of code, bars of music — quietly and with headphones on", management is not for you and your management career will suffer.
If you read how much Quartz Composer has been helping the Facebook design team, you might be less dismissive. With NoFlo we hope to bring that kind of collaboration to the web world.
https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/af182add5a2f
It's no secret that many of us on the Facebook Design team are avid users of QuartzComposer, a visual prototyping tool that lets you create hi-fidelity demos that look and feel like exactly what you want the end product to be. We’ve given a few talks on QC in the past, and its presence at Facebook (introduced by Mike Matas a few years back) has changed the way we design. Not only does QC make working with engineers much easier, it’s also incredibly effective at telling the story of a design.
Check out Managing Humans by Michael Lopp. Or, as @jennyp mentioned, check out his blog - rands in repose. His book is basically a collection of blog posts.
Another book that was recommended for new managers is https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118911954/ -
Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others by Byham and Wellins
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Not books, but other resources that might be useful:
https://www.tombartel.de/#blog
http://softwareleadweekly.com/ - also comes as a weekly email with links to different articles
https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass
Another amazing node-based app that was deprecated is Quartz Composer on Mac. It was extended by Mike Matas' team when he was at Facebook: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/introducing-origami-for-quartz-composer-f1173d0bd181
although this was also later deprecated in favor of Origami Studio, which retains the node-based UI: https://origami.design/
www.nesslabs.com
www.waitbutwhy.com
www.moretothat.com
www.daedtech.com
www.kalzumeus.com
https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/authors/morgan/
https://nav.al/how-to-get-rich
—- not personal blog per se but collection of all personal interviews. Excuse the clickbaitish title, it is not a pitch of any kind.