Kashif Manzoor

This book is full of common sense advice. I do recognize the adage that "common sense is fairly uncommon" - but the common sense presented in most of this book is really not that uncommon. The book has 25 chapters and each chapter has an author and an editor. The quality of material in these chapters, therefore, varies in direct correlation to the author's experience level, writing style and the topic. Several chapters of this book made me question the depth and writing capabilities of the author of the chapter. There are examples given in this book which are so trivial that instead of strengthening the author's argument they make the belittle the author's capability. For example, meet jake the engineer who goes to his manager (the author of the chapter on leadership) apologizing that he has to leave at 4:15 pm instead fo 5:00 pm because he couldn't reschedule an out of office meeting today and the author's response that I don't care how many hours you spend as long as you get the task done. The only good thing that comes out of reading these obvious pieces of advice is that it reduces Google's "larger than life" image to being just another good company which we see around us. One leaves this book feeling motivated that there isn't really any rocket science to building great engineering practices in your own IT company. The "Work Rules" and "How Google Works" are far better books - if you have read those then you can safely skip this book or read just the summary of each chapter (TL;DRs) and you would not have missed a lot.