Reddit mentions of The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

You buy me whisky?

Where I work, Expedia, we do the occasional meetup, like speed dating, where we attempt to match mentors and mentees.

But, for homework, read these books.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01J53IE1O/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06XP3GJ7F/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Got-Here-Wont-There-ebook/dp/B0041G68WS/

In all seriousness, unlikely I can help out directly, I've got 4 peeps I'm mentoring at the moment, (2 internal to my company, 2 external)

> I've never been a people manager.

There's oodles of books on this topic that will be far more beneficial than any academic program. I like Managing Humans. It's so much less about being confronted with dicey situations, and so much more about teasing out situations that may become dicey. There's a fine art to that. The things that are in-your-face as problems are trivial by comparison :)

Michael Lopp also has a podcast. Here's the one about management:

https://overcast.fm/+H4J-3Yk3c

Other book recommendations on the topics of "management" and "engineering management":

• The Manager's Path
  
• The Mythical Man Month
  
• An Elegant Puzzle
  
• First, Break All The Rules
  
• Radical Candor
  
  
  > I've never had budget responsibility and don't have any sort of business/financial management experience.
  
  Don't take a management job without someone above you on the org chart spending around an hour every week coaching you and your team through the transition. A small part of that should be "here's how to manage budgets. here's your dollars."

Start by asking yourself a few questions:

• What do you like about $currentBoss. What do they do well that you'd love to keep seeing happen?
  
• What do you not like about $currentBoss. What do you wish they would have fixed?
  
• What are your current needs out of this job? Are you looking for growth, mentorship, or just a place to chill?
  
  Use these questions to decide what specific questions _you_ want to ask. Be a little selfish. If you will be directly reporting to this new Dir of Eng, you should make sure they're going to be who you need them to be.
  
  Personally I'd ask questions about:
  
  
• What is your management style, do you do regular 1:1s?
  
• What was your favorite career ladder you've worked with in the past?
  
• How have you managed career advancement in the past for your reports?
  
• Have you had to deal with interpersonal conflict between reports in the past? How did or would you handle this?
  
• How do you delegate technical/architectural decisions? What processes have you found to work well for you?
  
• On that topic, tell me about a time you had to make an executive decision about a technical matter. How did or would you handle this?
  
• Based on what you've seen in the interview process what do you see yourself digging into first?
  
• How do you typically handle prioritizing tech debt and product progress?
  
  
  Consider grabbing a copy of The Managers Path by Camille Fournier. The book provides really good descriptions of each typical level in an engineering organization, consider skipping ahead to the chapters on Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering, and VP of Engineering to get an idea of where, ideally, they're coming from, where they should be, and where they're likely trying to grow to.
  
  
  Also remember, other people at the company are interviewing this person for a variety of perspectives. Focus your questions on "how will this person help me/us do our jobs" because everyone else interviewing this person will be doing the same.

I've been in QA for about three years - started out in Support, kept getting stuck with the "weird" tickets, got better at troubleshooting and bug hunting, and eventually started doing testing with the dev team. Working at very small startups helped speed this process up tremendously. I'm now working at a ~500 person company (huuuuuge from my perspective, I'm used to a dozen coworkers, tops!) and learned Selenium/Capybara automated tests about a year ago.

I haven't found any quality-related books that have interested me, and most of the technical resources I've found have just been whatever pops up on Google/Stack Overflow. I am also subscribed to this subreddit, and /r/qualityassurance, but they're both pretty low-traffic, and I wish more articles were shared here. If there are any blog posts that have resonated with you, I'd love to take a look as well!

The best thing I've done for myself, technically, was re-writing our automated UI test suite in POM. This ended up saving me hours of work a few months later when we added a bunch of new features, and I just had to copy-paste a few things to test for them. This is a good overview:

https://www.guru99.com/page-object-model-pom-page-factory-in-selenium-ultimate-guide.html

Because of how much grief this saved me, I continue to evangelize for it!

I can, however, recommend some management/team/soft skills/business-y books! I'm not in love with my current company, so I end up reading a lot of these to keep myself sane and motivated. Here are some of the ones I've liked the best:

• First, Break All The Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
  
• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
  
• Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst
  
• Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators
  
• Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
  
• The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice
  
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
  
• Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior - Kindle version on sale today for $2!
  
• Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 3rd Edition: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships
  
  A lot of these are available in libraries too, and I've made a habit of checking them out there, and buying them if I really like them.
  
  I hope this helps!

Manager's Path is a really good book about different levels of management, and Debugging Teams is a series of examples from the author's histories that can easily apply to your new position.