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 hardcover is out! As is the audibook. Now available in 6 languages.
Let me share a story with you. Imagine two individuals, Ellie and Leen, who have been friends since childhood. They've always been close, but they've never really talked about their true aspirations and dreams. Ellie has a secret passion for photography, but she's afraid to pursue it because she thinks it's not a "stable" career. Leen, on the other hand, has a dream of starting his own business, but he's hesitant to take the risk.
[Provide a concise synopsis of the premise without giving away major twists. Focus on the setup, main characters, and central conflict. For an album: describe the sonic landscape or lyrical theme. For a game: explain the core mechanics and setting.]
: AI is no longer a novelty but a fundamental tool for content production, recommendation algorithms, and hyper-personalization.
The winning strategy for creators and consumers in 2024 and beyond is not to consume more , but to curate better . The algorithm will feed you sludge if you let it. But the human desire for a great story—one that makes you laugh, cry, or think—is stronger than ever.
Dreams are a fundamental part of the human experience. They inspire us, motivate us, and give us a sense of purpose. When we have a clear vision of what we want to achieve, we're more likely to take action and make progress towards our goals. However, many of us struggle to articulate our dreams, or we feel like they're not feasible or practical.
The infinite scroll, the autoplay function, the algorithmic recommendation—these are not neutral design choices. They are technologies of capture, designed to exploit the brain’s reward systems (dopamine loops) and cognitive vulnerabilities (Zeigarnik effect, fear of missing out). The result is a new phenomenological state: continuous partial attention, where boredom has been algorithmically eliminated, and with it, the creative and reflective spaces that boredom once enabled. Entertainment has become less a choice than an ambient condition, like air or gravity.
Modern entertainment is vast and categorized by its mode of delivery and level of interaction.
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.
The Software Engineer's Guidebook is available in multiple languages:
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.