Leadership resources for developers

The video home of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, where Gergely Orosz holds long conversations with engineers, founders and engineering leaders about how software actually gets built, how careers grow and how AI is changing the work. Episodes are slow, detailed and practical. It suits working developers from a couple of years in up to engineering managers who want an honest view of the industry rather than hype.

• Career
• Leadership
• AI

A free online guide by Evan Smith on building kinder engineering teams, based on the difference between being nice (polite and agreeable) and being kind (actively investing in others). It gives concrete practices for honesty, asynchronous communication and code review, psychological safety, and giving feedback. It suits engineers, tech leads and new managers who want better team habits, and anyone whose code reviews feel harsh.

• Career
• Programming
• Leadership

An O'Reilly book from 2020 by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck and Hyrum Wright on how Google keeps an enormous codebase healthy over time: team culture, code review, documentation, testing at scale, deprecation, dependency management, large-scale changes and continuous delivery. The full text is free to read online. Most rewarding after a year or two of professional work, when the problems it describes start to look familiar.

• Career
• Programming
• Testing
• Leadership

A free book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp on how its product teams work: shaping a project before committing to it, betting on it with a fixed time budget of up to six weeks, and letting the team cut scope to ship on time. Even if your company never adopts the method, the chapters on shaping, appetite and scope mapping change how you plan and scope your own projects.

• Career
• Leadership

Career growth advice for software engineers from Steve Huynh, a former Amazon Principal Software Engineer with nearly 20 years of experience. Videos cover performance reviews, promotion, high-value skills, communication and how the AI era is changing engineering careers, including live coaching sessions with engineers moving from mid-level to senior and senior to staff. It suits working engineers who want to grow faster and understand how promotion really works.

• Career
• Leadership

A free, community-maintained GitHub repository by Jordan Cutler that collects resources for growing to senior engineer and beyond: newsletters, books, courses, papers, YouTube channels, podcasts, communities and tools. It focuses heavily on the parts of the job beyond code, such as communication, influence, career growth and leadership. Useful when you are technically solid but unsure what separates you from the next level.

• Career
• Leadership

An open source, MIT licensed list of hundreds of questions for one to one meetings, grouped into themes such as career development, job satisfaction, work life balance, team and company, and feedback for the manager. Managers use it to run better one to ones, and people being managed can use it to make the meeting worth their own time instead of another status update.

• Career
• Leadership

A sequenced path of six text-based courses for the engineering manager interview loop, combining coding, system design, microservices patterns, people management scenarios and senior leadership questions. It suits engineers moving into management and managers changing companies, who need to prepare for both the technical and the leadership rounds without piecing a plan together themselves.

• Career
• Leadership
• Job search

A course on the full engineering manager interview loop, from recruiter screen to on-site, covering behavioural, people leadership, situational and project retrospective questions with 27 complete example answers. It explains what the role involves and how to structure responses. It suits engineers stepping into management, managers interviewing elsewhere, and tech leads deciding whether the role is for them.

• Career
• Leadership
• Job search

A text-based course for senior engineering leadership interviews, aimed at directors, VPs and senior managers. It covers organisational scenarios, technical leadership decisions, business leadership, handling exceptional situations, leadership styles, emotional intelligence, decision making and inclusion. It suits leaders whose interviews focus on organisations and outcomes rather than on running a single team.

• Career
• Leadership
• Job search

A free website by Will Larson with guides and interviews about the staff engineer role and the senior individual contributor track: the four common archetypes, how people got promoted, and what the work involves day to day. It accompanies his 2021 book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track. The clearest free answer to what comes after senior if you do not want to manage.

• Career
• Leadership

A newsletter by Gergely Orosz on software engineering as a profession: how tech companies run teams, set pay, promote and hire, and what is changing in the industry right now. It is built on reporting from people inside companies rather than opinion. Useful for engineers deciding where to work, when to move, or how their own company compares.

• Career
• Leadership
• Job search

A Reddit community for software engineers with at least three years of experience, where discussion is about scope, management, difficult teams, promotions and career decisions rather than getting a first job. Less experienced members are limited to a weekly question thread. Useful for mid-level and senior engineers who want answers from people who have been the manager or made the decision.

• Career
• Leadership

A free, open source framework by Jorge Fioranelli that describes what each engineering level expects across five axes: technology, system ownership, people, process and influence. Radar charts for developer, tech lead, technical program manager and engineering manager roles make the gap between your current level and the next one visible. Useful for preparing a promotion conversation or writing a case for someone else.

• Career
• Leadership

A practical guide for engineers becoming tech leads, checked against Google's published engineering practices, the Google SRE book, Google re:Work research on team effectiveness and the ADR community. It covers defining the role with your manager, setting technical direction, planning and unblocking delivery, code review standards, growing the people on your team, handling incidents without blame, and communicating with stakeholders.

• Career
• Leadership

A practical guide to growing from junior to senior engineer and beyond, checked against public career ladders such as the Dropbox Engineering Career Framework and the GitLab handbook. It covers how ladders describe each level, what scope and impact mean, ownership, working with your manager, using feedback, collecting promotion evidence, choosing projects, and the staff and manager paths.

• Career
• Leadership

Two official courses on Google Skills for cost work on Google Cloud: "Understand Your Google Cloud Costs" (billing accounts, invoices, BigQuery billing analysis, dashboards) and "Optimize Your Google Cloud Costs" (budgets and alerts, quotas, committed use discounts), each with hands-on labs and a skill badge.

• Cloud
• Leadership

A fully funded Swedish Institute scholarship for one- or two-year English-taught master's programmes in Sweden, for people with work and leadership experience. It covers tuition, a monthly allowance and a travel grant. It is open only to citizens of a yearly list of countries, and Pakistan and India were not on the 2026/27 list.

• Career
• CS fundamentals
• Leadership

A reference for senior engineers stepping into leadership, in Staff engineer, Engineering manager and Not sure yet editions. It covers cross-team architecture, leading projects, incidents and postmortems, communication and influence, then the staff path and technical strategy or the manager path and hiring, performance and team health. Use it beside the Staff and leadership roadmap to revise each stage or get the vocabulary ready before a review or strategy meeting.

• Career
• Leadership

A six-stage plan for moving from mid-level to senior engineer by growing scope rather than hours: getting the next level written down with your manager, owning an unowned problem with before and after numbers, writing design docs and decision records, mentoring and better reviews, visibility without politics, and influence across teams. It suits engineers with a few years of experience who ship reliably and want to know what "more impact" means in practice. By the end you have the evidence a promotion case or a senior application needs, and a two-year plan for your direction.

• Career
• Leadership
• Programming

The international standard for an AI management system (AIMS): the requirements an organisation meets to govern how it develops, provides or uses AI, and the standard companies are certified against.

• AI
• Leadership

A roadmap for senior engineers deciding what comes after senior: the staff engineer path, engineering management, or a structured trial of both. Three shared stages cover owning architecture across teams, leading projects and incidents, and influence across the organisation; the path stages then cover staff archetypes, glue work and technical strategy, or one-on-ones, feedback, hiring and team health. It suits senior engineers and tech leads, and ends with evidence for the path you choose.

• Career
• Leadership

A free series of short official AWS courses on Skill Builder: FinOps fundamentals and strategies, cost optimisation for compute, storage, databases, data transfer and containers, and FinOps for generative AI on Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker. Search "Cloud Financial Management" on Skill Builder.

• Cloud
• Leadership

Free essays from Marty Cagan and his SVPG partners on product management: the product role, discovery, strategy, the product operating model, product culture and AI in product teams. It is the free companion to the book Inspired and a steady source of clear thinking about what product managers are for.

• Career
• Leadership