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The beauty of writing for the Web is there really is no plan. I have the luxury to mentally fumble about with any topic. Increasingly, those topics have focused on engineering management, and with the publishing of each article, I receive the occasional “Where’s the book?” inquiry. Yeah so, I’ve always wanted to publish a book, but there’s a problem. What’s the pitch? Zzzzzzzzz. There are hints of themes among my articles, but there is no single article that sets the stage for the rest; nothing that hints at a basic truth tying my reposing together.

“What, exactly, do you do?” Slack. Jawed. Amazement. This question is coming from someone I trust. A trusted employee who has been working in my group at the startup for years. This guy always tells me the straight dope and now he’s asking me what I do with my day because he honestly does not know.

Mondays start on Sunday. It’s the moment you realize that the weekend is over and you begin staring at the endless list of things to do that you began to ignore early Friday as the sweet, sweet smell of the weekend filled your office.

I hate meetings. hates them because we’ve all been to so many that have sucked unequivocally that we now walk into a conference room, sit down with our arms folded, and think, “OK, how long until this one is officially a waste of my time? How long until one sucks?” And then it does. Time is wasted. Hot air is generated and everyone sits around the table wondering when someone is going to stop the madness.

In your quiver of management skills, you’ve got a couple of powerful arrows. There’s the annual review where you take the time to really explain, in detail, what a given employee needs to do to grow. That’s huge. That can be life changing. That’s a big arrow. How about the layoff? That’s when you get asked who stays and who goes. You’re going to lose some sleep when you’ve got to pull the bow back on that one.

There’s someone standing outside your office and he’s not saying a thing.

Managers, wannabe managers, and folks who want to understand managers simply need to read , by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers.

One of my teams is facing a big, fat decision regarding future product direction, and the process has split the team in half: the Yes We Shoulds and the No Way in Hells. The manager of the team is facing a rebellion and spending much of his time trying to drive the team toward a decision.

There’s a very short list of new manager “must-dos” in the Rands Management Rule Book. The brevity of this list comes from the fact that a must is an absolute and, when it comes to people, there are very few absolutes. A clever way to manage one person is a disaster when applied to another. This makes the first item on the management must-do list: .

Fez. Fez is a senior engineer who works for me. He’s fictional, but you know Fez. He’s the guy who wrote that piece of code 9 million years ago that everyone is dependent on, but no one knows what exactly it does because Fez didn’t bother to comment a single line...oh yeah, and he wrote it in Forth.