Software engineers

Paths Beyond Senior (resources and links)

I’m presenting at DDD Perth 2025 today. It’s a great event, promoted as “A one day, fully inclusive, approachable and affordable tech conference for everyone.”

My talk is “Paths Beyond Senior“, and here’s the links in my talk and slides. I’ll post the slides and recording when I can.

Links and Resources

Perth Web Devs – the meetup I’m organising. Come join us at an event soon!
Culture Amp – where I work
Why Employee Development Should be HR’s Top Priority – a research report about the why and what of development plans. You need to give an email address for the PDF download -sorry!
Gergely Orosz about Staff Engineers “setting a pace”. Looks like he’s turned it into a book “The Software Engineer’s Guidebook“.
The Engineer / Manager Pendulum by Charity Majors. One of my favourite posts about paths beyond senior.
Pragmatic Engineer interview with Steve McConnell. He talks about “burst mode” and other career advice.
Lifelabs “Playing Cards Method” of giving better feedback.
How to give effective feedback. Culture Amp blog post that explains the Situation Behaviour Impact model.
Book review of Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Dave Kellogg. The book is good but if you’ve only got time for a blog post this is the one.

Books

Slide showing photo of the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott — Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Great book about being a manager. The tagline is “Be a kick ass boss without losing your humanity”. The “3 conversations” I mentioned are from this book.

Slide showing photo of the book Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard P Rumelt — Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard P Rumelt. Booktopia Link. There’s also a great blog post by Dave Kellogg summarising it.

Slide showing photo of the book Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres — Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres. Great book about how designers, engineers and product managers can work together to lead a team with great product discovery.

Quoting Avery Pennarun (Apenwarr)

Apenwarr with a healthy reminder that me and my coworkers are already rich, even if we don’t feel rich. And people who are richer don’t feel rich either:

We all talk a lot about how the “top 1%” are screwing up society, but software developers nowadays fall mostly in the top 1-2% of income earners in the US or Canada. It doesn’t feel like we’re that rich, because we’re surrounded by people who are about equally rich. And we occasionally bump into a few who are much more rich, who in turn surround themselves with people who are about equally rich, so they don’t feel that rich either.

But, we’re rich.

Based on my readership demographics, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a software developer. Do you feel rich?
Billionaire math by Avery Pennarun