My Two Cents on Success in Software Engineering Field

By Yigit Alparslan

An attempt to identify patterns in successful software engineers' behaviors: How successful software engineers achieved their success in the big tech and what we can learn from them

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yigit Alparslan
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005909437

Book preview

My Two Cents on Success in Software Engineering Field

Copyright 2021 Yigit Alparslan

Published by Yigit Alparslan at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Chapter 0: Why This Book

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Successful Software Engineers Usually Feel Lost At the Beginning

Chapter 3 : Asking The Right Questions

Chapter 4: Determining The Objective Function

Chapter 5: Everything Is A Probability

Chapter 6: Short Term vs Long Term

Chapter 7: Successful People Compare Themselves. Cautiously and Deliberately

Chapter 8: It is a numbers game

Chapter 9: Work Hard and Be Kind. Good things will happen

Chapter 10: Work Smart and Be kind. Better things will happen

Chapter 11: Feedback Loop

Chapter 12: Stupidity and Bravery look the same from outside and that’s why life is hard

Chapter 13: Leverage: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes

Chapter 14: Happiness from small things

Chapter 15: Pareto Rule and outliers in normal distribution

Chapter 16 : It is easy for others. Or at least looks like it

Chapter 17: Your resume is your list of sufferings

Chapter 18: Successful engineers know how to sit alone in an empty room for 30 minutes

Chapter 19: Putting it together

Chapter 20: Outro

The End

Connect with Yigit Alparslan

Chapter 0: Why This Book?

Success is measured by relatively(?) common standards and processes in the IT industry, (weekly 1:1s, monthly connects, performance reviews, criteria defined by upper management for bonuses, business impact, core business priorities etc). However, success is usually achieved differently depending on the person. That doesn't mean there aren’t some common practices.

People are different and might have their own way of fulfilling their job requirements but there are usually patterns of behavior among successful people. We can imitate these patterns. New engineers can learn from these patterns to be successful. They can imitate them. This imitation technique is usually very useful for new grads and people that just start their careers in the technology sector.

This book tries to identify common behavioral patterns of successful software engineers and conveys them to readers.

The book is for anyone even though the examples and observations are from the software engineering field.

Even though this book is for software engineers by software engineers, there is quite a bit of advice and lessons learned that could be useful for everyone regardless of their career.

The book also shares some insights from some famous and successful people like Conan O’Brien, Naval Kant and Lex Fridman.

It is a good idea to learn how and why successful people achieve success and I hope this book turns out to be useful.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

This book(?)(a collection of chapters or posts or whatever you want to call it) tries to identify patterns and give some tips for success in the software engineering field, especially for big tech in the US. That’s it. It has around 20 chapters and each chapter usually focuses on one common pattern that I have observed in my personal life by interacting with others. I am by no means successful whatsoever and this book is not a self-help book at all. All the opinions are my own and based on my own observations.

The reason I