- The Staff Engineer's Path - Tanya Reilly - 2022 - How to grow as a technical leader without becoming a manager — highly practical.
- Staff Engineer - Will Larson - 2021 - Real stories and frameworks from engineers who made it to Staff and beyond.
- The Manager's Path - Camille Fournier - 2017 - A technical leader's guide from tech lead to CTO — worth reading even if you never want to manage.
- An Elegant Puzzle - Will Larson - 2019 - Engineering management systems: team design, hiring, incident management, strategy.
- Peopleware, 3rd Ed. - DeMarco & Lister - 2013 - The argument that most software failures are social, not technical — still disturbingly accurate.
- The Clean Coder - Robert C. Martin - 2011 - Professionalism, estimates, pressure, and how to behave when things go wrong.
- Software Engineering at Google - Winters, Manshreck, Wright - 2020 - How Google thinks about maintainability, testing, and operating at scale — free online.
- Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows - 2008 - Systems thinking fundamentals — applies to codebases, teams, and organizations alike.