The Software Developer's Career Handbook

Chapter 1. How to Win

You’ve had a small number of career-defining moments.

Small decisions cross your desk and inbox all day, but this isn’t a small decision. It’s massive, and once you’ve made this decision, there is absolutely no going back. At this moment, you make a painful discovery—Crap, I’m an engineer.

You don’t have an MBA. You know there is a People Team in the building somewhere, but you’ve no idea what to do with them. You want to hide in the comforting structure of code, but you know that this decision will significantly affect your career at this moment...if only you knew how.

Can I argue for more money after I receive an offer? OK, how? What do I do when my boss lies to me? What do I need to do to resign? Should I apply for a management gig? What’s a program manager? They make more money doing less, right? Can I get a promotion without talking to a single human being? Why can’t I work from home all the time? There isn’t a class in college that teaches any of this. Wikipedia can define it, but it can’t help a social introvert who sees much of the world through a keyboard.

This is the hand you’ve been dealt. Let’s embrace your situation.

A System Thinker

We engineers are different, and understanding these differences is an excellent place to start. I believe engineers are system thinkers. The world is like a computer. After years of successful use of the computer, we’ve come to follow a specific ideology:

• We seek definition to understand

• the system so that we ...