Smart People on LinkedIn - Engineering Management Edition
The Algorithms (be they Google, LinkedIn, the platform formerly known as Twitter, or whatever) exist to serve their creators and generate revenue for corporations, not to help you find Smart People to learn from. Happily, lots of nice people answered my plea on LinkedIn for suggestions of Smart People to follow if you're looking to level up your engineering management skills. I've waded through the suggestions, read a ton, and I'm going to record some of what I've found here for posterity. I hope to continue to grow the list as I build it out and expand my library of resources.
- David Anderson writes a paid weekly newsletter about tech industry careers and leadership advice. I really liked his article You Should Be a Product Owner — Plus a Story of Dave Being a Jerk. I may occasionally have also been kind of a jerk.
- Sam Burns writes about techy stuff on his blog. I like his Coding Standards Rollout Tool article.
- Coltin Caverhill has a tech leadership newsletter called "Lead Kindly" (great name) and is very present on LinkedIn. I've bookmarked (or whatever you call saving stuff in Notion) his How to Train Your Manager article or future reference.
- John Crickett's newsletter "Developing Skills" has tons of good stuff in it. It can be hard to tailor your communication for your audience when you're used to talking to other software engineers. How To Talk To Non-Technical People And Get Their Agreement has some guidance!
- John Cutler seems to be on my LinkedIn feed constantly with thoughtful thoughts. He's also a bit of a troll. I love it.
- Omar Halabieh shares daily insights on leadership and management. I like his post about what authenticity really is and how to live authentically.
- Erika Hall is brilliant. She writes (and reposts) about design, user experience, information architecture, etc. I LOVED her post where she argued "We should think of design as intentional incremental improvement" and goes into the problems of not taking that philosophy.
- Lara Hogan is my go-to resource for management questions. Her Questions for our first 1:1 is incredibly valuable.
- Jacob Kaplan-Moss is a font of engineering leadership wisdom. I really like his recent All I Need to Know About Engineering Leadership I Learned From Leave No Trace. I'm also a huge fan of his estimation series
- Owain Lewis writes a newsletter called Software Engineering Manager. There's a lot of good stuff there, but I found Systems scale, but people don't helpful.
- Lorna Mitchell probably has a post that answers your question. I don't care what your question is, she probably has a relevant post. She's talked about how she writes posts for herself to refer to later, and often finds the answers to her own questions on her own blog. Brilliant. I think her Short tech writing style guide for developers is brilliant.
- Ryan Murphy's LinkedIn posts never miss. His newsletter is called The Software Engineering Times. I've bookmarked his recent article (with Owain Lewis) called How To Run Successful Software Projects.
- Gregor Ojstersek has a paid newsletter called Engineering Leadership. I really like his recent LinkedIn post about measuring engineer productivity.
- Laura Tacho writes a lot about metrics (unsurprisngly since she's the CTO of DX, which offers a platform for measuring developer productivity). There's a ton to learn from her, but this post about who benefits from inefficient processes got me thinking.
- Dora Vanourek writes about leadership and burnout and offers executive coaching. This post provides practical guidance on building thriving working communities.
- Kelly Vaughn write The Modern Leader. Her insights on hiring (and applying) for jobs would be of help for anyone in the market and she's one of the few people I've seen writing about appropriate use of generative AI for engineering teams.
