Downloadable e-book - A Field Guide for Software Engineers, plus a lot of changes
Free articles, forever. Plus a new field guide and a few other things.
Hi,
I’ve spent the last month writing an e-book. It’s called How to Be Taken Seriously: A Field Guide for Software Engineers, and it’s about the non-technical skills that decide what happens to your career after the code stops being the hardest part.
Communication. Influence. Reading rooms. Managing up. The conversations every engineer ends up needing to have but nobody trains you for.
It’s 24 pages, designed properly, and from today it’s free for every paid subscriber to The Software Engineering Times.
While I’m at it, three other things are changing
The weekly article is now permanently free. No more time-based paywall. No more “subscribe to keep reading” on older pieces. Every article I’ve ever written here, and every one I write from now on, is fully readable by anyone forever. The reasoning is simple: I want the writing to do the work of finding the readers it’s for, and a locked archive gets in the way of that.
Paid pricing is changing to £8/month or £80/year. The founder tier is gone. Paid subscribers now get:
The field guide on signup
The worksheet and a short video walkthrough for each weekly article
A monthly 4,000 word deep-dive on a specific career or leadership situation
Live office hours on the last Thursday of every month.
If you’re already paid, you’re grandfathered at your current rate forever. No change, no eventual hike. You’ll be able to download the e-book right now.
Why now
The honest answer is that this newsletter has been going for years, has been sporadic for most of them, and I want to actually make a proper go of it. The field guide is the start of that. The new offer is built around the work I’d genuinely enjoy doing every week.
If you’ve been around through the quiet stretches, thank you. If you’ve just arrived, welcome. Either way, the weekly article hits your inbox the same as ever from next week.