The Effective Engineer

The Secret to Growing Your Engineering Career If You Don’t Want to Manage

Is staying a software engineer your whole life a good career choice? Or must you transition into management to continue climbing the engineering ladder? That’s what engineers recently wondered on Quora, and it’s an important question worth addressing, particularly for those not psyched about managing people. The good news is that staying a software engineer and opting out of management is a fine career choice. If you want to bypass... (more)

The Highest-Leverage Activities Aren’t Always Deep Work

Michael designed solid software systems and wrote clean code. He enjoyed working on both technically interesting problems as well as hygienic refactors of the codebase. And over the years, Michael had climbed the engineering ladder at a top Silicon Valley tech company to become a senior engineer. But one aspect of his work ethic made him difficult to work with and actually held back his career growth. He eschewed any... (more)

Why’d You Do That?!? An Engineer’s Guide to Debugging User Behavior

“Why isn’t my code doing what I expect?” That’s a question we ask ourselves every day as software engineers, and we’ve built a repertoire of techniques to help us debug code when things go wrong. Tools like breakpoints and strace let us inspect the state of a running system. Assertions and print statements enable us to validate our assumptions about a program’s behavior. Minimal reproducible test cases eliminate distractions so... (more)

Google Tech Talk: Proven Techniques for Increasing Your Engineering Impact

By far, one of my favorite parts about working at Google was the opportunity to attend tech talks by industry veterans. People like Joshua Bloch (the lead architect behind the Java collections API used by millions of software developers) and Guido van Rossum (the inventor of Python) would share their many years of insight and expertise with other Googlers on how to design and build great software. These talks taught... (more)

What I Learned from Quip on How to Build a Product on 8 Different Platforms with Only 13 Engineers

How do you build a great product that impacts the lives of millions of people with just a small engineering team? That’s a question I’ve often thought long and hard about during my years at Quora and, more recently, at Quip. I joined Quora when the team consisted of only 12 people and Quip when it had just 13. Both startups have ambitious missions. Quora aims to share and grow... (more)

Communication: The First Casualty of a Team’s Growth

“As teams and companies grow, what processes and systems break down that often don’t get addressed quickly enough?” That’s the question I posed to leaders from Dropbox, Facebook, Stripe, and Lyft at a recent panel on Engineering for High Growth. And one after another, the panelists all responded with variations of the same theme: communication is often the first casualty of growth. As a team grows, it gets harder to... (more)

How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake You Can Make as a New Software Engineer

As a new software engineer, you’re bound to make a number of tactical mistakes due to a lack of experience. Maybe you build some functionality on your own only to learn later that there’s a common design pattern for how to do it better. Or you accidentally push a bug to production. Or you forget to reason through scalability and performance issues until you’re already hard pressed against a deadline.... (more)

How to Identify and Make Contributions with a Big Impact

Every day, we deal with many issues that demand our time: meetings, emails, phone calls, bug fixes, pager duty alerts, the next deadline. We all want to make a meaningful impact in our careers, but our time is limited. Working more hours might seem like a reasonable strategy, but it’s not an effective way to scale your impact and can lead to burnout – I learned this lesson the hard... (more)

Master Adjacent Disciplines

“Should I focus on becoming a generalist or a specialist? Which route better sets myself up for career success?” Engineers who already know the importance of learning and of investing in themselves often ask these questions and wonder where to best spend their time. You can find effective engineers who create successful careers by becoming deeply proficient experts in their field — whether they’re experts in machine learning, systems infrastructure,... (more)

What 2 Years Spent Self-Publishing a 77,000-Word Book Taught Me about Shipping Products

Two years ago, when I quit my job at Quora to write my first book full-time, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I had a romanticized notion that I’d travel around the world for a year, sipping lattes at cafes and happily typing out chapters, and then come back with a book that readers loved and that made a meaningful impact on their lives. Reality followed a... (more)

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Read a sample chapter

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Get the book now

Grow Your Skills Beyond the Book

Listen to podcast interviews with top software engineers and watch master-level videos of techniques previously taught only in workshops and seminars.

Consistently deliver business value — become the key person your team trusts to ship business-critical initiatives.
Study in-depth interviews with leaders from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Stripe, and Instagram — double down on their highest-leverage investments, and avoid their most costly mistakes.
Pick the right projects most likely to propel you up the career ladder — including the nuances of how the criteria change as you get more senior.

Get the bundle now

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Read a sample chapter

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Get the book now

Grow Your Skills Beyond the Book

Listen to podcast interviews with top software engineers and watch master-level videos of techniques previously taught only in workshops and seminars.

Consistently deliver business value — become the key person your team trusts to ship business-critical initiatives.
Study in-depth interviews with leaders from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Stripe, and Instagram — double down on their highest-leverage investments, and avoid their most costly mistakes.
Pick the right projects most likely to propel you up the career ladder — including the nuances of how the criteria change as you get more senior.

Get the bundle now