Gergely Orosz

A curious thing I noticed: it's so rare for an engineering manager or Staff+ engineer to have a *direct* chat with a business stakeholder. Most rely on PMs to do this, and do the "translation."

And yet, talking with the business directly is such a high-leverage activity for engineering.

I have yet to see pushback from the business: almost always it's the opposite, as they usually *want* to get more attention from engineering, and not less.

Going from a ~Staff position at a Big Tech with a reasonably modern engineering culture to an engineering leadership position with a step-up in title & the mandate to “modernize” a division at a more traditional company: I see this happening more. Talking with people: it’s tough.

A person I talked with moved to such a role at a bank, knew it would be challenging but didn’t realize how much of the org was resisting change, and wanting to hang on to how they have worked for a decade or more.

What are activities outside of building software that senior+ / staff & above could take part in to improve their organization?

Here are a few. What else have you observed being 'strategic' ones that could have gains on the mid-term or on the long run?

The skill I urge everyone to strengthen is critical thinking.

Whenever you don’t fully understand something: ask “why?” and “how?” and get those answers. Dig deep if need to.

When you think critically, you might not follow the masses at all times. And when you do: you know why.

Sadly, much of social media encourages people to not think for themselves, but take the thoughts of “thought leaders” and “influencers” at face value. Resist the temptation and you’ll be better for it.

Early in my career, I had a mental "ranking" of which companies I imagined were the best in the world. Back then, Google was my #1 spot.

As I gained more experience and met more people, I realized that this type of thinking misses how your team is as important as the company.

And people come and go between companies. The Google of today consists of people who worked at thousands of other companies just a few years before.

An uncomfortable question startups need to ask themselves: is our existence & valuation a zero interest rate phenomenon or do we have a business model where we will generate profits, and eventually get to an ARR of ~1/5th of our last valuation?

The answer will be “no” to plenty.

While interest rates were zero, investors funded businesses with unclear business models, and no clear paths to profits. In a high interest world, they will no longer do so.

I remember how, around 2000, people I knew started to become fulltime online poker players, making thousands in steady income/month.

Then in 2006 the US banned online poker. The same ppl could no longer make a living.

I think of this as the US inches closer to banning crypto exchanges.

These friends of friends back then claimed that making a living as an online poker player was effectively down to skill.

Turned the reason they could do so was b/c casual players in the US funded all this.

In my survey about Copilot and ChatGPT, the most frequent comment / "wish" mentioned is to have an "enterprise" Copilot / ChatGPT that is internal to a company does not "leak" code outside (eg to MS or OpenAI), and is trained on the company code & docs.

Who is building this?

An interesting thing to consider on what "senior engineer "means: incentives.

Take developer agencies that bill people out. Their interest will be to bill out senior engineers for higher rates and thus will be lenient in applying this title.

It's in their business interest!

Whereas if we're talking about a company with internal levels - and no "billing pressure" - then this incentive does not exist.

An unexpected root cause for high profile outages that I have now heard happen several times:

Moving a key part of your cloud infra to run on AWS spot instances to save cost (a lot of cost!)

Then those spot instances get reclaimed… and not being prepared for this 💥

AWS spot instances are cheap exactly because they can be reclaimed *anytime*. They rarely are: but eventually will be!

How is "senior engineer" defined at your company & what are the expectations at that level?

I'm collecting examples of how this definition differs across different places. I you can share the definition example at yours, I'd be grateful (I will summarize, not share as-is).

You can share over here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scoop or in DMs.

I'll share the summary doc as well with those sharing details.

Definitions in the public:

Dropbox: https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic4_software_engineer.html

Sourcegraph: https://handbook.sourcegraph.com/departments/engineering/dev/career-development/framework/

It's been s long time since people outside of tech were excited about/interested in the same thing my tech friends are. ChatGPT broke this barrier, which is remarkable.

A friend of a friend who works in marketing started to talk about how they use ChatGPT & their impressions.

If I had to put a finger to the last time this happened: it was perhaps when smartphones started to go mainstream (iPhone / Android / Windows Phone) around 2009-2012.

"How hard could it be to get to Staff Engineer at Uber?"

Well, in 2020, about 2-3% of all engineers were at Staff (L6) or above levels. Here's how the distribution looked like, roughly:

Uber has since updated levels. More details in today's The Pragmatic Engineer issue at: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/uber-engineering-levels/

Startup funding seems to have fallen back to ~2020 levels. However, one are that is worse than in a decade is exits, which have not been this low in 13 years (!)

More details in this The Pragamatic Engineer article: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-state-of-startup-funding/

A friend who has gone though both their tech company being sold and acquiring another company was saying they found little to no resources on the *tech side* of M&As. How the due diligence works, preparing, case studies etc.

Do you know of any such resources? Please share if so!

@capeta@ursal.zone yeah, seems like an explosion for this use case!