Mixed Reviews on The Software Engineer's Guidebook: Practical Career Guidance for Engineers

This book is a must read for Software Engineers. The author bridged the gap (and sometimes mysticism behind the industry) between what it takes to be a good engineer and what it is believed (from universities, general population, etc.)

This book will help you find your career path, whether your ambition is to enter management, leadership, become a mega super senior developer, or own the best possible career. The book provides advice on various situations you may encounter during your work. It guides you through different companies, their leadership, and explains how you should behave in different situations.

I highly recommend reading the book if you aspire to be a real professional.

I didn't find much new in the book, which felt like it could have used expansion and some heavy editing for both content and typos. One challenge for the book is that it isn't clear who the target audience is; I could see this being very helpful to someone who is at the very beginning of their software engineering career, but it spends quite a bit of time talking about Senior engineers and getting promoted to Staff Engineer. That's fine, but what Staff or Sr level engineer is going to benefit from a ten page overview of testing or system design? If it's a technical book for mid-career engineers, it needs less breadth and more depth on technical topics. If it's a career book, focus on that and skip the mini overview of DDD.

I hope there's a second, edited edition that refines the text towards a target audience. That said, I'm planning to pass along my copy to a new engineer that I mentor - I think they will get something from it.

Having been developing software for decades, I bought this book following the excellent reviews. I thought it would be a classic like “The Pragmatic Programmer” that I had missed.

That was not the case. Opening this book was a disappointment. To start with, the print quality and formatting were terrible. Font, spacing, structure are completely amateurish. No good programmer would ever accept their work delivered like that, which makes one wonder about the author’s excellence on software engineering…

Then, the content. Very similar quality. Generalist statements without much interest, presented in a boring manner.

I have worked in software for several decades now and have read most of the classics. I have no clue why this book has so many positive reviews, because this is not one of them. It is just another book that will be forgotten after its initial hype.

As a comparison and for those looking for a much better alternative, I recently read “The staff engineer’s path” from O’Reilly and it is one I can clearly recommend instead.

I honestly can’t recommend this book. As a principal engineer, I’m not the audience for a big part of the book but I always enjoy trying to pick up what tidbits I can. Additionally, I love the newsletter. Unfortunately, this book is so boilerplate and doesn’t actually go in depth on much. Almost every section ends with, if you don’t know the answer, ask ChatGPT! Upon further reflection, based on the formatting, I kind of wonder if this book was written by ChatGPT. I don’t usually leave reviews but given the cost of the book, and the hype around it, hoping I can save some folks some money.

Thoroughly enjoying the content and coverage in this text!