Will Larson's Elegant Puzzle: A Systematic Approach to Engineering Management

Amazon Customer: I have a feeling this book is composition of author's articles which makes reading unpleasant. The content has great value and in most cases is targeted to middle managers

United States on Sep 28, 2023

Gretchen_Rox: Required reading for an EM at any level.

United States on Sep 07, 2023

J. Pruetting: I've ordered the hardcover version of this book twice, once in 2019 and once in 2022. The older book from 2019 looks and feels like a really high quality book; it's beautiful. The book from 2022 looks like a cheap copy. It went from having a smooth, subtle crosshatch texture with off-white and subdued black on the cover to a rough texture with stark white and pure black. The pages also feel thinner and cheaper as well.

United States on Jun 21, 2022

Tamil Selvan: Must read for managers who wanna shift from bringing problem to the table to solving them. Because this book builds awareness around every EMs problems in such a simple language. Liked it so much

India on Apr 26, 2022

Kindle Customer: The book is an extensive, hands-on collection of practices for engineering managers at different stages of their career and their toolkit evolving with them as time goes by. It also gives a sense of the various constraints that apply at different organization sizes and how to work with (or around) them.

Netherlands on Feb 08, 2021

berlin-mitte: When I started reading this book I felt delighted and on the path to somewhere good. I then started noticing that the info graphics took more energy to process than they provided value for, then the duplication in content, and the lack of proper editing: it started to feel like a lack of respect towards the reader and like art out of place.
I noticed I had wanted this book to be great and to lead me and that I had found something shiny, with questionable messages at times, with lose pieces glued together, instead. If you turn your blog into a book, you want to add a plot, not just a table of contents. Otherwise it's a blog on paper disguised as a book.
I consider it sad that Will considers migrations "the sole scalable fix to tech debt": it is not a fix but rather selling "giving up on it" for a fix — very convenient for management — while an actual fix needs change in culture on a non-technical level. What Will says regarding "work the policy, not the exceptions" fails to recognize that people vary greatly in needs.
Overall, the book was interesting to read but I sure hope that future managers will not copy from Will, blindly.

Germany on Aug 19, 2020

Simon NINON: I bought this book without too many expectations: most management books are usually either poorly written, either full of banalities, either too abstract.

However, this book is one of the rare excellent ones, and most probably a must-read for any manager (probably even outside tech).
I'm a junior manager and I initially thought the book was not a good fit for me as I started to read the first chapter: this book is written by an upper-manager and talks about many problems related to upper-management that a junior manager does not encounter himself, especially in the first two chapters.

However, I kept reading and it was the right thing to do: the book is incredibly complete and covers everything. Many points are actually relevant whether you are a junior manager or a more experienced one. For the other parts more related to upper-management (for example, restructuring a department), those are still very interesting and eye-opening to read for a junior manager: you get to better understand what your own manager is doing now, or what challenges he will face soon. It truly allows you to connect the dots and reflect more about your own company...

United States on Jan 26, 2020

Eryx: Great book for developing managers.

Mexico on Dec 16, 2019

MR CONNON MACRAE: This book is a generous share of Larson's experience and what has worked for him. Some of the chapters resonated strongly with my own experience but it was also full of new ways to consider old problems in pragmatic ways without an arogance that this is the only way. Must read as far as I am concerned of you are involved in managing engineering teams.

United Kingdom on Sep 27, 2019

Gergely Orosz: An Elegant Puzzle is to date the most hands-on perspective on engineering management within a high-growth, tech-first organization, that I have read. It's a long overdue book for engineering managers and leads. I like how it takes an engineering-focused view on management, instead of taking a management-focused view on software engineering, that other books on this topic have.

Having read many management and engineering management books, what set Will's book apart is it starts right where the others end. An Elegant Puzzle wastes no time - especially not in the beginning - on covering the generic manager's toolkit, such as 1:1s, giving feedback, team building, which many other books devote a good chunk of their content. Instead, it talks about the engineering pain points that come with a high-growth organization and team, once management fundamentals are in place. What to do when our systems are slowing us down, but we have too many migrations? What's a good way to pay down tech debt? How do we say no, when there is so much work, but not enough people? How do we grow seniority evenly across the team?

The tone of the book is casual: it feels like we're sitting with...

United States on Aug 03, 2019