Software Engineer

Software Engineer

About This Book

Dedication

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Why I Wrote This Book
2. What This Book Is Not
3. What This Book Is
4. Who This Book Is For
5. A Note on Names

Part 1: The Work

Chapter 1: The Job Description vs. The Job

1. The Posted Version
2. The Actual Job
3. Autonomy and Its Weight
4. What “Scalable” Actually Means
5. What “Ownership” Actually Means
6. The Parts Nobody Posts
7. The Real Qualification
8. The Gap, Illustrated
9. What Changes and What Does Not

Chapter 2: Production Is the Teacher

1. The Education That Cannot Be Replicated
2. The Difference Between Staging and Production
3. What Production Systems Require
4. The Production Mindset
5. The pre-ship checklist
6. Five Years at Scale
7. The Antivirus Years
8. Learning Production Before You Inherit It

Chapter 3: The Ownership Mindset

1. Two Engineers, Same Codebase
2. What Ownership Is Not
3. What Ownership Is
4. The Operational Health Criterion
5. Run the ownership health check
6. Improvement Without Permission
7. The Goals That Force Clarity
8. Ownership and Career Growth
9. Starting Where You Are

Part 2: Getting Hired

Chapter 4: Reading the Job Description

1. What the Job Description Is
2. The Required/Preferred Split
3. The Technology Stack as Signal
4. The Culture Signals
5. The Company Research That Actually Matters
6. Thirty-minute pre-interview research routine
7. The Hidden Requirement: Production Experience
8. When the Job Description Is Wrong
9. Reading the Seniority Level
10. The Compensation Signal
11. The Red Flags

Chapter 5: Your CV

1. What a CV Is For
2. The Structure That Works
3. The Six-Second Scan
4. Writing About Production Experience
5. The Technology List Problem
6. Tailoring to the Role
7. What to Cut
8. The Cover Letter

Chapter 6: The Technical Interview

1. The Format Has Reasons
2. The Architecture Question
3. Prepare your five-minute architecture story
4. The Scalability Questions
5. The Resilience Questions
6. The Observability Questions
7. The CI/CD Questions
8. Technical Topic Reference
9. Before the Interview
10. Pre-interview production inventory

Chapter 7: What They Are Actually Testing

1. The Question Beneath the Question
2. The Insider Account
3. What Marcus Got Wrong
4. What the Debrief Said About Me
5. What Pedro Got Right
6. What They Are Actually Testing
7. The Depth-Breadth Calibration
8. The Self-Evaluation Problem
9. The Defensive Response Pattern
10. Building the Interview Character
11. A Note on Scope

Chapter 8: The Interview in Practice

1. Theory Into Rehearsal
2. Scenario 1: The Depth Overreach
3. Scenario 2: The Generic Answer
4. Scenario 3: The Defensive Response
5. Scenario 4: The Vague Production Story
6. Scenario 5: The First-Person Rewrite
7. Scenario 6: The Unprepared Candidate
8. Catching Yourself Mid-Interview

Chapter 9: The Offer

1. The Evaluation Goes Both Ways
2. Reading the Offer
3. The Negotiation
4. Deciding Between Offers
5. When the Offer Goes Silent
6. Before You Start

Part 3: On the Job

Chapter 10: Your First Ninety Days

1. What the First Three Months Are Actually For
2. The First Two Weeks
3. The First Month
4. The First Three Months
5. The Team Map
6. First two-week 1:1 template
7. Setting Goals That Are Actually Goals
8. Remote Onboarding
9. The New Person’s Advantage

Chapter 11: Building Production Systems

1. The Architecture Is Not the Design
2. The Serverless Model at Scale
3. Asynchronous Messaging Patterns
4. Database Patterns
5. The Security Patterns That Prevent the Most Common Failures
6. Cost as a Design Constraint
7. Version Control as Deployment Infrastructure
8. The Questions That Reveal Depth

Chapter 12: Incidents, On-Call, and Recovery

1. The Test of Operational Maturity
2. Before the Incident: The On-Call Setup
3. Write a minimal runbook this week
4. During the Incident: The Response
5. After the Incident: The Post-Mortem
6. The Culture of Blameless Post-Mortems
7. On-Call as a Learning Opportunity

Chapter 13: Communication as Engineering

1. The Resistance
2. What Engineering Communication Actually Is
3. Clarity Without Simplification
4. Writing That Works
5. Engineering writing quick-reference
6. Facilitation: The Multiplied Communication Skill
7. The Stakeholder Relationship
8. The Compound Effect

Part 4: The Career

Chapter 14: From Junior to Senior

1. What the Titles Mean
2. The Transition to Mid-Level
3. The Transition to Senior
4. The Technical Depth Requirement
5. When the Promotion Does Not Come
6. Setting Goals That Compound
7. The Quality Standard
8. Tests Are Documentation
9. Rename three tests this week
10. The Feedback Loop
11. Managing Upward

Chapter 15: Mentoring

1. The Leverage Argument
2. What Mentoring Actually Is
3. The Dependency Failure Mode
4. Giving Feedback That Changes Behavior
5. Being Mentored
6. The Nurture and Growth Responsibility
7. The Long Return

Chapter 16: Influence Without Authority

1. The Title Is Not the Leverage
2. Why It Works
3. The Technology Introduction
4. Systems Architecture as Influence
5. Changing What You Disagree With
6. Influence and Visibility
7. The Evidence, Not the Argument

Chapter 17: Building in Public

1. The Compounding Asset
2. Open Source
3. Writing as a Technical Credential
4. The Visibility Flywheel
5. Twenty Years

Chapter 18: The Long Game

1. Twenty-Two Years
2. The Technology Is the Medium, Not the Message
3. The Arc of a Career
4. The Geographic Move
5. When to Leave
6. When It Is Not Your Choice
7. When the Problem Is Named

Chapter 19: Building Deliberately

1. Building Something of Your Own
2. What Carries Forward
3. Staying Relevant
4. The Letter Forward

Part 5: The Profession

Chapter 20: Ethics and Responsibility in the Age of AI

1. The Code That Already Exists
2. Honesty About Competence
3. Avoiding Harm
4. The AI Coding Tool Question
5. Honesty in the Interview Context
6. Privacy and the Systems You Build
7. The Standard That Was Already There

Appendix A: Hiring Process Checklist

1. Before You Apply — CV Preparation
2. One Week Before the Interview
3. Two Days Before
4. The Night Before
5. During the Interview
6. Self-Assessment Rubric
7. After the Offer — Evaluation Checklist

Appendix B: Career Review Questions

1. Part 1: The Past Year
2. Part 2: The Current State
3. Part 3: The Next Year
4. The Archiving Rule

A Note on the Books in This Series

About kdeps

Further Reading

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