I’m a software engineer who, after a decade of working across the stack at startups and tech companies - Skype, Microsoft, Skyscanner, Uber - became an engineering manager. As a manager, I mentored dozens of engineers, helping people level up faster. However, I still did not have any single book to recommend, which would recap the type of advice I found myself repeating.
Three years into management, my team grew large enough that I found less time for in-depth mentoring with everyone I would have liked with. To still keep sharing my thoughts with my wider team, I started writing blog posts about some of the advice I found myself repeating, like writing well or good code reviews. These posts were warmly received and far more people ended up reading and sharing them than I expected. This is when I decided to write this book.
The book follows the structure of a typical career path of a software engineer, from starting at a company as an intern or new grad, through the role model senior/lead, all the way to being successful at the staff/principal positions. It summarizes what I learned while being a developer and how I approach mentoring engineers at different stages in their career.
The topics apply to all sizes of companies: from being an efficient engineer in a small scaleup where everyone is on the same office to working at a large, growing company, dealing with people across different offices and timezones. Regardless of where you are in your career, I hope that you’ll get a fresh perspective and new ideas on areas you can grow further as an engineer by reading this book.
