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 Art of War" is an ancient Chinese military treatise written by Sun Tzu, a high-ranking military strategist and philosopher. The book is composed of 13 chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of warfare, such as planning, tactics, and leadership. The text has been widely studied and applied not only in the military context but also in business, sports, and other fields where strategy and competition are involved. This paper will provide an in-depth analysis of "The Art of War" and its relevance to modern times.
The exact date of the book's composition is unknown, but it is believed to have been written during the Eastern Zhou period (771-256 BCE), specifically during the Warring States period (475-221 BCE). This was a time of intense warfare and competition among various states in ancient China, and Sun Tzu's work was likely influenced by the military campaigns and strategies of that era.
"The Art of War" is a timeless masterpiece of strategy and philosophy that remains widely relevant today. Sun Tzu's principles and concepts are universal and can be applied to a wide range of competitive and strategic situations. The book's emphasis on adaptability, deception, and intelligence gathering makes it a valuable resource for anyone seeking to gain a strategic advantage. As a work of literature, "The Art of War" is also notable for its concise and poetic language, which has made it a favorite among scholars and strategists for centuries.
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.