I like books. For a career, they have an absurdly good price-to-value ratio: pay something like $20 for a book and you'll get distilled information from hundreds of hours of an experienced person. Even if you were able to take them out to lunch, it'd cost more. The returns into your salary are on such a different scale than the money you paid that we can't even compare them; really the primary cost is the time spent reading and absorbing. Books are great.
I often hear questions from other engineers that fall into categories of questions other people have asked previously. Not surprisingly, common questions tend to have books written to address them. Thus, I find myself providing recommendations to the same books over and over again, and rather than dig them out of my brain or Amazon list every time, I've decided to list them here.
Some of these books I've read and can recommend directly. Many I have not yet read, but they have come recommended via sources I trust enough to have them be on my own to-read list. This is not necessarily a "great books!" list, then, but rather a recording of research that I have done myself to find resources.
- Letters to a New Developer
- A collection of very short pieces of advice for someone who is working their first job.
- The Staff Engineer's Path
- Even if you've read all of staffeng.com a bunch of times and watched LeadDev videos and spent time in #staff-principal-engineering in RLS, this still has a bunch of useful stuff. In-depth, well-organized, clear, and a treasure trove of links to other useful resources.
- The Passionate Programmer
- Crucial Conversations
- Difficult Conversations
- Nonviolent Communication
- Say What You Mean
- Dialog: The Art of Thinking Together
- Radical Candor
- Antifragile
- Behind Human Error
- The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error
- Google Books has a preview. That alone has some great advice, and gives a good idea what the book is like.
- Resilience Engineering in Practice
- Site Reliability Engineering
- The Site Reliability Workbook
- Still Not Safe
- Engineering a Safer World
- The 5 Principles of Human Performance
- Human Factors In Engineering and Design
- Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn From Star Wars
- Outcomes Over Output
- A short book, mostly an introduction to the idea of focusing on results rather than how much effort we put into a project. There are some examples of how to do this, but if you're doing it for real I think you'll want another book to help you out there; this is mostly useful to help convince change.
- Radical Focus
- OKRs. I don't remember why people recommended this over Measure What Matters, High Output Management, and similar, but there were convincing reasons.
- Four Thousand Weeks