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.
The advent of mobile internet and the proliferation of smartphones have revolutionized the way we consume music and videos. One of the most significant developments in this space has been the emergence of 3GP video songs, which have become incredibly popular worldwide, especially among users with limited internet connectivity or storage capacity.
Hits like "Say You, Say Me" or "Don’t Stop Believin’" suggest that love always resolves if you just keep fighting. In reality, many relationships end not because of a lack of love, but because of incompatibility. The hit song storyline often erases the virtue of walking away.
Could you please clarify what you're looking for? Are you interested in:
So press play. The storyline is about to change.
Nirvana’s "Heart-Shaped Box" (1993) is a relationship song about entrapment, decay, and obsession. It offered no redemption, only imagery of a "heart-shaped box" as a coffin. This storyline resonated with Gen X: love as a beautiful trap you cannot escape. Meanwhile, Alanis Morissette’s "You Oughta Know" (1995) introduced righteous, unhinged female rage into the breakup narrative. The ex-lover was no longer a sad figure; he was a target.
Britney Spears’ "Toxic" (2003) changed the game. It was a hit about a bad relationship that celebrated the badness . The storyline was no longer "I want to fix this" but "I know this is poison, and the poison tastes incredible." This paved the way for The Weeknd’s entire catalog (e.g., "Blinding Lights" ) and Rihanna’s "We Found Love" , where chaos and passion are synonymous.
Consider "Every Breath You Take" (The Police, 1983). It is literally about surveillance, yet it is played at weddings. Similarly, "You’re Beautiful" (James Blunt, 2005) is about a man obsessing over a stranger. The hit song often frames possessiveness as eternal devotion. This creates a pernicious storyline: If they really loved you, they would never let you go, even if you want to leave.
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.