Like the previous year, 2021 went by in a blur thanks to the overly long lockdown in most of Europe. Locked within our four walls and relying on nothing but our wits and books to act as our companions, mentors, and teachers, it seemed a bit appropriate that this resulted for most of us in (re)building our reading habits. I personally managed to read close to 6–10 books a month during the first half of the year.

I decided to pick the top 6 from the books which I read in this past half year, where the books have somewhat of a work related subject. I currently work as a Senior Individual Contributor in Tech (Principal/Staff Engineer) and most of the suggestions from my list might be more focussed towards my own career path.

#6 — Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value#

One of the biggest traps we as software developers fall into is to distance ourselves from the customers and forget what is the value we are providing by the software we are writing. I was looking for good books to get better at understanding Product Management and writing Strategy.

This wonderful book has some good insights on how to build a product company with a customer-centric focus and talks a lot about a framework on how to build a good product organisation. I found the traps to be very insightful — some examples include the difference between features and strategy, and why Product Managers are not mini-CEOs.

#5 — Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon#

I always wondered how a big organisation like Amazon still continues to function at its scale, and yet keeps some of that startup culture at heart. This book has a lot of secrets and insights on how Amazon runs a successful organisation, with examples of the principles and practices they use — with “Working Backwards” at the heart of it.

It talks about leadership principles and how they guide the company; their introduction of the Bar Raiser and how it helps scale hiring while keeping the quality bar high; and my most favourite takeaway — how Amazon dropped presentations altogether and adopted a writing culture. Such a writing culture removes any preferential treatment individuals can have where their presentation prowess overwhelms the main discussion areas. This promotes diversity and can provide a level playing field for introverts to be successful in their careers.

#4 — Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow#

This book was a bit of a wildcard and I did not expect it to be this good. There is a lot of focus on how software architecture is swayed by team organisation and structure. It talks a lot about how to organise your tech teams, and my biggest takeaway was defining the 4 team types and the 3 team interactions. The Domain modeller in me thoroughly enjoyed this split.

This book is also useful for Senior Individual Contributors in Tech and Talent Acquisition Partners alike, as it has some key messages to bridge the gap between the respective job functions and Tech.

#3 — Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 36 Engineering Challenges#

Probably one of the most definitive books right now on building mobile apps (iOS, Android) in a large production setup. Most books you can find for such large production setups are generally focussed towards backend and distributed systems — this book gives a very nice blueprint on how to set up your mobile organisation, best practices, and shares the complexity of mobile development.

This is also quite useful for Frontend apps as well, as some of the lessons are similar. Bonus cookie points for giving definitive suggestions on Localisation and Internationalisation, and how they play such a big role in any client-facing application’s design and workflow.

#2 — Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track#

Will Larson followed his highly successful book An Elegant Puzzle with this definitive book on “Staff Engineer”. This was one of those books which I wished I had access to when I first made the switch towards becoming a Senior Individual Contributor a couple of years ago.

In this book there are a lot of tips on how to make the switch towards a Staff Engineer; the importance of finding a sponsor who will support you with this switch and prepares you to be successful in your new assignment. The key takeaway for me was the emphasis on the specialisation of every Senior Individual Contributor and how their tasks are generally a lot different from another individual doing the same role. This led to the introduction of the 4 Staff Engineer archetypes, which provides an excellent framework to figure out what kind of tasks your assignments would require.

This takeaway helped me personally to organise my tasks with more focus on the “archetype” which my department at work required, and ultimately led me to manage my expectations much better. Highly recommended for Senior Individual Contributors of any job function, not just Software Engineering — many of the tips and hints are quite job-function agnostic.

#1 — The School of Life: An Emotional Education#

“I wish I had read this book 10 years ago” — a colleague of mine recently quoted about this book. That is it. That is how I wanted to describe this book, as I was lost for words after finishing it.

For me the discovery of this book was a bit penicillin-ian: a close friend who is also my guardian angel on mental health recommended a book with a similar title, and I accidentally bought this book on my Kindle. We realised it was different when we started discussing the book’s contents!

Mental health is important, and for someone like me who has had their ups and downs with this and struggled to navigate through it successfully in the past, it becomes extra important to be successful at work — especially in Tech, where the work involves sapping a lot of mental and emotional energy. Thanks to a big open culture around mental health at my current workplace and good leadership, this topic has become less of a taboo and much more comfortable for individuals to speak about openly.

It is important to step back from the plethora of topics we are trying to learn at work — be it feedback culture, leadership, etc. — and rather first work on ourselves. This book has some key messages targeted towards us, our relationships, and our work. I would dare say that this one is like Harry Potter — meant to be read and re-read!

Originally published on Medium.