The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact - Bret Taylor

nThe most effective engineers - the ones who have risen to become distinguished engineers and leaders at their companies - can produce 10 times the impact of other engineers, but they're not working 10 times the hours. They've internalized a mindset that took me years of trial and error to figure out. I'm going to share that mindset with you - along with hundreds of actionable techniques and proven habits - so you can shortcut those years.

Introducing The Effective Engineer - the only book designed specifically for today's software engineers, based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at top tech companies, and packed with hundreds of techniques to accelerate your career. For two years, I embarked on a quest seeking an answer to one question: How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful? I interviewed and collected stories from engineering VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders at today's top software companies: established, household names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; rapidly growing mid-sized companies like Dropbox, Square, Box, Airbnb, and Etsy; and startups like Reddit, Stripe, Instagram, and Lyft.

These leaders shared stories about the most valuable insights they've learned and the most common and costly mistakes that they've seen engineers - sometimes themselves - make. This is just a small sampling of the hard questions I posed to them: What engineering qualities correlate with future success? What have you done that has paid off the highest returns?

What separates the most effective engineers you've worked with from everyone else? What's the most valuable lesson your team has learned in the past year? What advice do you give to new engineers on your team?

Everyone's story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes. You'll get to hear stories like: How did Instagram's team of 5 engineers build and support a service that grew to over 40 million users by the time the company was acquired? How and why did Quora deploy code to production 40 to 50 times per day?

How did the team behind Google Docs become the fastest acquisition to rewrite its software to run on Google's infrastructure? How does Etsy use continuous experimentation to design features that are guaranteed to increase revenue at launch? How did Facebook's small infrastructure team effectively operate thousands of database servers?

How did Dropbox go from barely hiring any new engin