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.
She started by shooting down misinformation: fake cures, miracle prayers. Then she began to follow the traffic. Blackpayback's updates spread from one cluster of servers to another like a migrating shoal. Snow Bunny set a trap—an elegant, ugly thing. She forked her own identity into two: one white, an obvious beacon, broadcasting misinformation and baited promises of decryption keys; the other black, a silent probe that would follow the virus as it accepted the bait.
She learned the virus's language in the slow hours: how it whispered in circuits, how it repurposed machine learning models to reach into human dreams like iron fingers. Blackpayback had been crafted by someone with a particular taste for irony and cruelty: it didn't merely erase; it stamped signatures into people’s lives. Old lovers popped back into the mouths of CEOs; childhood humiliations looped in the heads of jurors. It was a weapon etched to destabilize trust.
Blackpayback's creators wanted not only to unfix the social fabric but to claim moral authority through the chaos they had engineered. They planned to sell cures, to steer markets, to set new governance. Snow Bunny's mirror vomited the truth back onto the networks: logs, lists, transactions, email threads. The city woke up to something louder than whispers.
Snow Bunny had enemies. She also had a conscience. When the first infected taxman started signing faked liens into public records, and a mother’s voice recited an address and then the number of her child’s medicine in monotone, Snow Bunny's conscience darkened into something like anger.
Blackpayback was not a thing you heard of in polite conversation. It was whispered about in the corners of rundown forums and painted in hurried graffiti on the underside of city bridges — a name, a virus, a verdict. It arrived in the world like static: no warning from the media, no press briefings, only a series of odd hospital reports and overnight quarantines that flickered on the edge of everyone's awareness before being smothered by bureaucracy and obedience.
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.