By Gergely Orosz, the author of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and Building Mobile Apps at Scale
Navigating senior, tech lead, staff and principal positions at tech companies and startups. An Amazon #1 Best Seller. New: the Korean translation is out now!
"Bridging theory with practice, this book presents a clear roadmap for anyone navigating the tech landscape. A must-read for engineers at any career stage."
"Spanning a huge range of topics from technical to social in a concise manner, this belongs on the desk of any software engineer looking to grow their impact and their career. You'll reach for it again and again for sage advice in any situation."
"You need to understand ‘the lay of the land’ and know how to thrive in different environments in order to progress as a software engineer. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook goes beyond helping just with this: it does a comprehensive job covering areas that engineers need to know of in order to keep progressing at each engineering level in the tech industry.”
"The book equips you with how to grow beyond the mid-career developer levels, and understand what is expected out of roles and situations you could be in. Reading this book made me lament one thing: how it was not available earlier in my career! It is absolutely essential for all software engineers."
“The beauty of this book is that it covers multiple rungs of the career ladder, with enough concepts to give even the most experienced developers something new to consider. Even with 17 years in the industry, I still found new ideas to use. It's a real treasure trove of actionable information.”
“A treasure trove of perspectives, suggestions and ideas. These will help you move to the next level no matter where you are in your career.”
Read more reviews:
The book is separated into six standalone parts, each part covering several chapters:
Parts 1 and 6 apply to all engineering levels: from entry-level software developers to principal or above engineers. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 cover increasingly senior engineering levels. These four parts group topics in chapters – such as ones on software engineering, collaboration, getting things done, and so on.
This book is more of a reference book that you can refer back to, as you grow in your career. I suggest skimming over the career levels and chapters that you are familiar with, and focus reading on topics you struggle with, or career levels where you are aiming to get to. Keep in mind that expectations can vary greatly between companies.
In this book, I’ve aimed to align the topics and leveling definitions closer to what is typical at Big Tech and scaleups: but you might find some of the topics relevant for lower career levels in later chapters. For example, we cover logging, montiroing and oncall in Part 5: “Reliable software systems” in-depth: but it’s useful – and oftentimes necessary! – to know about these practices below the staff engineer levels.
Right now (in Feb 2024) there is not one yet. I am in the progress of getting this version ready as well. Get notified the audibook is released.
You should now be able to ask your local book shops to order the book for you via Ingram Spark Print-on-demand - using the ISBN code 9789083381824. I'm also working on making the paperback more accessible in additional regions, including translated versions. Please share details here if you're unable to get the book in your country and I'll aim to remedy the situation.
I'd like to think so! The book can help you get ideas on how to help software engineers on your team grow. And if you are a hands-on engineering manager (which I hope you might be!) then you can apply the topics yourself! I wrote more about staying hands-on as an engineering manager or lead in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.
I've gotten this variation of a question from Data Engineers, ML Engineers, designers and SREs. See the more detailed table of contents and the "Look inside" sample to get a better idea of the contents of the book. I have written this book with software engineers as the target group, and the bulk of the book applies for them. Part 1 is more generally applicable career advice: but that's still smaller subset of the book.
