Vicki's Reviews > The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

I'm somewhere between individual contributor and management in my career right now (mentoring and, at times, technical lead,) so this book was of interest to me.

I hate to say that this book was disappointing because I enjoy following the author on Twitter and have enjoyed lots of her clear, well-written blog posts about management and technical strategy, particularly ones like "how do individual contributors get stuck".

I think this book essentially tried to stretch those blog posts into an entire volume, which doesn't quite work. There is a lot of repetition of concepts, and even though the book is clearly organized according to the table of contents, it doesn't seem to follow any particular logical pattern when you're in the weeds. The ideas, while interesting, all seem to be common sense, without a firm path to implementation, and they don't have enough technical detail for me to be very interested (I realize this may be a personal preference, as I was particularly keen to know some of the details of the author's work with Zookeeper, etc, in which she was heavily involved.)

As someone who's written non-fiction before and also written about tech while trying to keep employer-specific details out of posts, I really appreciate this attempt, but I hate to say that it did not go nearly the way I was expecting it to, and I was left feeling a little flat.