Raising signority in software development generally means that at some moment you get subordinates. Be it your own development team when you strive to become a team lead, or you just find that you are the most experienced person in a group that develops some chunk of functionality, you have to somehow manage them. And in most cases, while you study hard to write good code, nobody teaches you how to manage people. It's a bit like parenting: you look at your own team lead and think: "those are the mistakes I'm not going to repeat" only to repeat half of them and to make a whole bunch of your own.
When I find myself in (times of trouble) this role of the most experienced developer in the team, I was unsettled. I had to learn a lot in the field where I had almost no experience. Made my share of mistakes, got my share of advice, useful and not so much. That's when I took the "Hard skills for managers" course that turned out very helpful in setting up the system to the heap of facts and practices that accumulated in my head.
The taskbook is written in a light manner, easy to study and generally pleasant. A few tasks look overwhelming a bit, but aside from that, it's a good set of problems pinpointing specific areas of knowledge, with nice texts explaining things that are sometimes so obvious you do not think about them, and sometimes just require you to look at them from a different angle you never thought of taking. Is it a silver bullet? No. Do I feel more confident in this role after passing the course? Definitely yes. What do I deserve after taking it? I think, the amount of time I'll save over the year with the knowledge I got will constitute more than a week, so it's a well-earned week-long rest equally distributed over the lifetime of a project. Plus a praise for not making stupid mistakes, both from my managers and from myself.
