Engineers Survival Guide: Advice, tactics, and tricks After a decade of working at Facebook, Snapchat, and Microsoft

The author is a smartass that throws funny phrases like- "nine women cannot make a baby in one month," making a book about work highly enjoyable.You don't have to be an engineer to benefit from the advice in these pages. Anyone working for a large or small corporation can find something useful in this book, like:Dealing with managersWork evaluationsAll hands meetingsHow to take good risks at work that pay off laterHow to become more useful and make your coworkers see you as essentialHow to position yourself to get a promotion and when to jump ship (very important people)If you're an engineer or about to become one. This is required reading.Corporate environments suck, but if you understand the game and navigate it well, you can thrive, make your money and be happy.The chapter on adaptability is pretty useful.

This is a heartfelt and thoughtful book, a "give back" to the programming community by one of us (an immigrant) who has been through a lot and feels compelled to share. Many of us have low emotional intelligence and simply don't figure out how to navigate jobs and organizations on our own. This book discusses many situations and offers different points of view based on hard earned experience. I appreciate that author is not sentimental or self-pitying. He settles no scores, makes no apologies, and resists wading into culture wars - thank you. It's just good advice offered concisely and with good cheer. Thank you, Merih.

Working in the tech industry is one of the latest popular and cool trends nowadays. Although passing interviews to land a job is challenging, a bigger challenge awaits candidates like dealing with politics, working on high visibility projects, handling tough situations, convincing highly skilled and talented people, defending your ideas, etc. This book explains these topics in detail and aims to guide you to manage your career properly. It has very good examples to overcome different types of situations. I highly recommend this book for both engineers in their early stages and experienced ones

I had to pleasure of reading this book in one sitting. It is full of great insights. Although I'm in early stages of my career there are some chapters talking about the things that I happen to be familiar with, there are some chapters which I anticipate to experience and rest is just enlightening. This is not a "Bootstrap your career and make trillions of $$$ in an hour" kind of book. This is literally a guide book that helps you to navigate on the foggy ways of your career.

Direct, clear and entertaining, this book is packed with practical advice on how to navigate the various situations we all encounter throughout our careers as software engineers. Merih does a great job in providing candid and actionable advice while sharing his rich journey in many important tech companies. Whether you want to optimize your outcomes, reflect on specific situations or just extract nuggets of information, this is a great read.

A friend of mine recommended this book to me despite not having much knowledge in software engineering. Ive dabbled in it here and there but have never thought of it as a profession. I didn’t understand the recommendation at first and was skeptical, But after the first few chapters I fully understood why! This book has so many layers to it. There’s so much to be learned from it. The majority of the tips, tricks and advice can easily be transferred into any corporate work place! There’s was so many Parts of this book where I felt that the author was speaking directly to me! Merih does a great job of translating his own beginner experiences into a way that an up and comer can relate to. I’m very impressed with the simplistic nature of his explanation/experience with working in corporate America and all of the nuisances involved with it. Thanks to my buddy for bringing this book to my attention and Kudos to the Author for helping me feel more confident in my new endeavor.

Being in a tech company, whether new or seasoned, can feel lonely. School doesn’t prepare you for how to influence smart technical people, manage your career, or operate complex systems. Merih has been extremely honest and generous in sharing his journey, his own imposter syndrome, his own wins and losses, making the lonely journey in tech more bearable and even enjoyable. Through numerous real examples, get some insight into how the system works, without having to figure it out on your own.I myself am pretty seasoned, with a great network of friends and mentors, but for the quiet conversations I have with only myself, this book has been great for reflection, and ironically, helping me put together topics for me to discuss with others and no longer hold them secret.

Author shares a lot of useful vignettes from his software engineering career with a touch of his personal story. He gives a lot of practical advice in succinct terms which is also applicable outside of tech.

Working in the tech industry is one of the latest popular and cool trends nowadays. Although passing interviews to land a job is challenging, a bigger challenge awaits candidates like dealing with politics, working on high visibility projects, handling tough situations, convincing highly skilled and talented people, defending your ideas, etc. This book explains these topics in detail and aims to guide you to manage your career properly. It has very good examples to overcome different types of situations. I highly recommend this book for both engineers in their early stages and experienced ones

You can definitely tell this book was written by an engineer. Chapters are short and to the point with tldr summaries at the end.PROS:1. Useful tips for working at a big engineering company2. Applicable and practical3. Completely relatableOne of my favorite chapters was one-on-ones with leadership. I too used to HATE one on ones. I felt so much pressure, but after reading this book, I realized that one-on-ones is for MY benefit and I need to be the one to steer these one-on-ones so that I can get the most out of it.My only feedback is that there are certain chapters that left me wanting more and wished the author would go in more depth. For instance chapter 21: The importance of Tools and Patterns and chapter 46: Knowing Popular Framework and How They Work. I was engaged and wanted to know a little more about how do I know if a framework or tool is worth the investment? How do I know if I'm choosing the right one? How do I get over my decision paralysis!

Great book from the author. I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes and could relate to multiple tips such as the importance of building a quick prototype, and knowing how subtle things like the approach towards asking for help matters. The book offers a plethora of advice which most engineers (even experienced ones) would probably only learn a subset of, and learning the content would likely help you learn to avoid (or quickly course correct) mistakes. I highly recommend this book!

This is a great book, and I wish I had read it before going into the engineering world. This book distills the most important aspects and difficult soft/hard skill issues. There should be a course in every software engineering degree program that goes over the concepts in this book. There isn't though, so you'll need to read this one yourself. I recommend this to every new engineer that asks me for help

I love this book. I had liked to read this book around 4/5 years ago because the experiences and advice inside could help you in your career if you are starting as an engineer or if you already are a senior. The content is straight to the point. Every chapter has a conclusion and some advice and ideas that conclude every lesson. Merih is a great person and is always open if you want to ask him something. So please buy this book. It will give a boost of experience in your career.

This book taught me how to collaborate with other co-workers, how to get support from my managers, TLs, etc. One most important thing the book corrected a lot of my misunderstandings, e.g., I always took my manager as a person I need to report to, but this took told me I should work together with my manager and get support for my career growth. I will use it as a reference book in the future. When I was in a certain situation, I would refer to this book for suggestions!

I have been in the industry for sometime and there was still golden tips in here! Already applying many of these methods to my day.

This is one of the few (area-specific) self-improvement books that are well-written, concise, and contain actionable items from a veteran in the industry. I love how there's a summary section at the end of each chapter so you can skip topics that aren't important to you and still grasp the main ideas. Highly recommended for tech workers regardless of seniority.

I thought that some of the first points were rather obvious but after a while, I started getting some real insights from this book. I think if you’re someone coming into this career for the first time, this book will be of value to you.

I loved this book. It could answer the questions that started recently popping up in my head after a few years of working in tech. There are both advices on how excel in your career, as well as bits of knowledge on technical aspects. The short summaries at the end of every chapter were really helpful for taking notes for myself. It was such an enjoyable reading, thank you, Merih, for sharing the knowledge and tricks coming from your experience!

Very useful book with a lot of tips for software engineers. I especially like how short and concise it is.

I loved this book. It could answer the questions that started recently popping up in my head after a few years of working in tech. There are both advices on how excel in your career, as well as bits of knowledge on technical aspects. The short summaries at the end of every chapter were really helpful for taking notes for myself. It was such an enjoyable reading, thank you, Merih, for sharing the knowledge and tricks coming from your experience!