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.
: Studies show that for a campaign to be effective, the audience must identify with the survivor. If a viewer doesn't see themselves in the storyteller, the impact of even the strongest message is significantly reduced.
: For survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, seeing others' stories on platforms like Our Wave or The Survivors Trust reduces "crippling isolation" and fosters a sense of collective power. Notable Active Campaigns (2025–2026)
Reviewers and researchers highlight critical areas where campaigns must exercise caution:
: Long-term engagement with some survivor narratives in medical contexts has been linked to increased anxiety or "concerns about recurrence" in some patients, suggesting that stories should be paired with professional health navigation.
: Narratives can reduce "counterarguing"—the tendency for audiences to mentally argue against facts—and increase cognitive rehearsal of the message.
Survivor stories and awareness campaigns have evolved from simple testimonials into sophisticated, multi-media tools designed to drive systemic change. A review of recent literature and active campaigns reveals that while personal narratives are highly effective at fostering empathy and engagement, their impact is deeply tied to ethical execution and audience identification.
: In health sectors like breast cancer awareness, survivor stories are proven to increase motivation for screenings and help patients cope with psychological challenges through peer-to-peer trust.
: An online platform that uses interactive multimedia, such as "What Were You Wearing" exhibits, to combat victim-blaming and foster empathy.
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.