marksutherland reviewed Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
Review of 'Elegant Puzzle' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
An assortment of opinions about Software Engineering management in large webstack companies, some of which are interesting and useful, and others either address circumstances I've yet to encounter or likely never will.
Larson's conflation of "Engineering Management" with "Software Engineering Management in a small handful of high-scale fast growth companies that happened to flourish in the early 21st century" is frustrating, but once you understand that he's writing primarily from his career experience the limitations and utility of his advice is more apparent.
One thing this book is useful for is the bibliography, both of books and papers, but you can find equivalent links on his blog (where much of the content of the book was workshopped anyway): lethain.com/best-books/, lethain.com/some-of-my-favorite-technical-papers/ . This definitely suffers from the incoherency of blog-to-book adapations (e.g. rands, Spolsky) but on the other hand as a curated set of related ideas it's more tractable to …
An assortment of opinions about Software Engineering management in large webstack companies, some of which are interesting and useful, and others either address circumstances I've yet to encounter or likely never will.
Larson's conflation of "Engineering Management" with "Software Engineering Management in a small handful of high-scale fast growth companies that happened to flourish in the early 21st century" is frustrating, but once you understand that he's writing primarily from his career experience the limitations and utility of his advice is more apparent.
One thing this book is useful for is the bibliography, both of books and papers, but you can find equivalent links on his blog (where much of the content of the book was workshopped anyway): lethain.com/best-books/, lethain.com/some-of-my-favorite-technical-papers/ . This definitely suffers from the incoherency of blog-to-book adapations (e.g. rands, Spolsky) but on the other hand as a curated set of related ideas it's more tractable to get through than a decade of blog entries.
Much like Staff Engineer, it's a bit short, and clearly padded out, and the advice is less generally applicable than it might appear at first glance, but there are definitely some useful nuggets in here alongside reminders of other people's good advice.
