Daniel Heller - Building a career in software: A Comprehensive Guide to Success in the Software Industry

My colleagues tremendous appetite for guidance has shown me that theres a critical gap in todays Computer Science education: young software engineers enter the industry with excellent technical preparation, but no one has taught them a darned thing about how to be a professional engineerthey have to teach themselves, and inevitably the hard way.

This book aims to fill that void with a professional manual for the aspiring software engineer, a guide to managers, role changes, professional technical practices, technical communication, meetings, on-call, project management, advancement, ongoing study, mentorship, compensation, and more.

For my part, Im a software engineer at a major software company. Ive been writing code and managing engineers for 12 yearsIve worked at Apple, Uber, AppDynamics, and Microsoft (as an intern), managed teams of over 20 people, interviewed literally hundreds of engineers and managers, and been interviewed scores of times. Ive written production JavaScript, Java, C++, Go, C, and assembly, shipped code in the web browser and the kernel, and led the responses to perhaps a hundred production outages. And I continue to do those things today; Im not a consultant or an architect but a regular working coder, fixing bugs and debugging outages, trying to solve the toughest problems I can find with my code and my insight, because I enjoy it and think I do it reasonably well.

Most importantly for you, Im not an especially gifted programmer; respectable definitely, above average on my good days, but Im nothing like a 10x coder. So, Ive made a fun and reasonably remunerative career on everything but coding brilliancediscipline, study, communication, project management, collaboration, prioritization, etc., etc., etc. This book will help you build your career the same way.

Part 1 is about careers: hiring, compensation, and promotion work in tech companies, how to best navigate those processes, and how to chart a course for growth and advancement.

Part 2 is about the sundry nontechnical skills that help you get traction in your daily work: project management, running meetings, working with your boss and peers, recovering from mistakes, team citizenship, and many other subjects Ive found to challenge engineers in the workplace.

Part 3 goes deep on the single most important nontechnical skill for programmers: the sadly neglected art of engineering communication. It starts with a holistic model of communicating at work, then moves on to practical treatments of topics like technical writing, email, and asking effective questions.

Finally, Part 4 is technical; it covers a carefully curated selection of technical subjects that Ive found particularly difficult for new software engineersthe kinds of issues that come up every day in software offices and never in software classrooms.

This book strives to offer you the best possible returns on your time; it treats a wide range of subjects with short, stand-alone sections friendly to random access as well as cover-to-cover reading. I hope it will arm you with the tools to steer your career with confidence, save you some or all of the mistakes that taught me my lessons, and ultimately help you succeed as a professional in software.

Im in the debt of Simon Newton, Angie Zhu, and Dave Pacheco for their encouragement to see this project through, their invaluable feedback on my first draft, and everything Ive learned from witnessing their excellence.

Thanks as well to my intrepid early readers, Syrie Bianco, Andrew Mains, Carissa Blossom, Adam Cath, Marek Brysa, Dan Simmons, and Courtney Ryan; their feedback made a difference.

Thanks to Prashant Varanasi and Akshay Shah for an impactful nudge to get started at the beginning of the project.

By no means least, thanks to Matt Moodie and Shiva Ramachandran at Apress for their wonderful insight in shaping this mass of text into a book.