Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley : Successful Engineering Entrepreneurs' Best Practices and Career Guidance for Tomorrow's Technical Leaders on Leadership, Management, Development, and Business

by Thomas Hempel, Marilson Campos, Leo Dagum

Containing the ideas, practices, and histories of a group of Silicon Valley VP's, directors and CTO's with more than 400 man-years of experience running engineering teams in Silicon Valley, this book contains everything you need to know to successfully run a hi-tech engineering organization. Honest and comprehensive, this book will save you time and pain in dealing with people, technical and business issues. This book covers the topics you need to know to get the job done right. It's what we would have wanted to know the day we took the job! You will learn how to develop your career as a senior technical leader, and how the job evolves from a startup to an established organization, including the challenges of very rapid growth. The book looks at all components of the complete product development lifecycle, from product planning to development to support, giving practical advice for the leader as to what to do in each phase. It looks at team leadership, dynamics and development, with topics ranging from developing team culture to meeting management to personnel development, as well as dealing with difficult situations. The difficult challenges of build-versus-buy decisions, offshore and outsourced development are also reviewed. Finally the connections of the engineering leader to the other executives and teams in the company are studied. Each chapter is illustrated with real life examples. The focus throughout is on realism - illustrating successes as well as problems and challenges, especially the kind of daily life situations that you only learn on the job. All in all, in this book, you will find an overview all the major topics anyone running an engineering organization is likely to face!

472 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2009

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book deals with all aspects of a work where technology and business demands collide and it is the reader's job to make the best of it.

Very useful not only for executive-level positions but also for any techies who for some reason find themselves between business and technology. Authors cover an exhaustive range of topics, both technical and personal, provide practical explanations and advice.

You get the feeling that the authors have not learned the meaning of those business terms from a textbook, but from working situations. They are engineers who learned to operate with business people and have understood their perspective.

The book is trying to give general advice but you can feel it's coming from a software development background. This is not a big downside, but the software-specific parts are very detailed and thus quite useless for non-software products.

If nothing else, the reader will greatly benefit from scanning through the vast number of points one should look out for when dealing with tasks on the edge between business and technology.

[Sam Hahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

perhaps unfair of me to rate...
I'm one of the authors
:)