Blog » Book: The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau
Book: The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau
The main idea of this book is simple: as a software engineer, you have plenty of opportunities to optimize what you're doing for higher impact. The book provides plenty of advice on how to identify which activities make the most difference in whatever you're trying to achieve (have the most "leverage", as the author says).
A good example would be taking some time to automate things you would do manually. This in a sense generalizes to having tight feedback loop, for instance a fast compile-run cycle, or a way to reproduce a bug you're working on quickly. The book also talks about importance of having good metrics (as opposed to "flying blind") and systems that fail fast (so that you immediately know what is the source of failure).
Of course, writing software is not the only area where you can go looking for "high-leverage" activities. There are things like recruitment, onboarding and mentoring new work-mates, which pays off in terms of these people being able to contribute to your project. And on the individual level, it's important to optimize your own learning, since that will generally become more useful later than money from a well-paid, but interesting job.
Overall, the book is full of unsurprising but generally useful software engineering advice on various aspects of the programmer job, like working with code, estimation, team work or risk management. The examples get boring at times - hearing for the Nth time what this or that famous company did gets old quickly, and gives an impression of a typical American self-help book. I liked some stories, though. I learned for instance that Dropbox uses fake traffic to detect problems with site load quickly - if they notice a problem, they simply turn it off and investigate the issue without any time pressure (which they couldn't do with real traffic)!
The most important part that I got from this book, however, wasn't any specific engineering tips (which you can easily find elsewhere) but the attitude of "leverage": don't waste time on unimportant stuff, go look for things you can do that will matter the most.