Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz Twitter profile

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Gergely Orosz

6 months

Four years in the making and finally released today: The Software Engineer's Guidebook is out!! Get it at Amazon or via @whereistanya described it like this: "This book is well named: it really does feel like the missing guidebook for the whole industry"

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Musk is mocking the sw engineers he’s fired at Twitter on the way out. Tech is a pretty small community. These aren’t faceless people, but ones who built up lots of goodwill w the tech community. Striking to see what their peers in tech are writing: messages of support & praise.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

This served as a valuable lesson for me on: Diverse loops matter not just for diverse candidates: but to see how candidates respond to people not like them Some more advice on hiring diverse teams:

Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team

Stories from six engineering leaders who succeeded in building and growing diverse teams. Hiring approaches, retention tactics and strategies.

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

3 months

My first manager at Uber started a GitHub page back at the time with resources to become a more proficient developer - ones he personally found helpful (he did not have a CS degree). I realized he is *still* updating it, 7 years later! A neat list:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

This is what micromanaging from the top looks like, when the CEO *thinks* they can tell the source of the problem and how to fix it, just by looking at it. It’s incredibly frustrating when it happens to you. It’s rare to see it this public. Good luck to engineers in the weeds.

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

1 year

Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

We'll look back at this week as an inflection point when Big Tech lost its former attractiveness. It will be stories like Justin's, and the countless ones to be told, where many realize that, during layoffs, people become numbers, and 8% of those numbers need to be "marked."

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

What many sw engineers don't realize: The majority of jobs do not hire you to write the highest quality code or produce the cleanest architecture. They hire you to solve their business problems very efficiently. Sometimes this means high-quality code. Sometimes not at all.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

As a tech lead or eng manager, you so frequently get request from above or from other teams to drop what you are doing and work on this thing they need, *now*. During my 4 years at Uber after asking these questions, 9 out of 10 times it turned out it wasn't really urgent:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

12 days

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US. Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions).

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

18 days

Made a larger credit card purchase on a US website with my EU card. Usually this prompts a second factor auth: but it didn’t happen. Net day I my bank blocks my card and does calls me for a fraud check. Asked them why I didn’t see the 2FA? They told me something interesting:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

I know that on Twitter it's fashionable to mock how "slow" Twitter was to ship. But the more I learn about the internal systems, and why it was built in a way, the more impressed I am. Eg Twitter onboarding to k8s was extremely challenging (+brilliant) thanks to legacy infra.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

5 months

ChatGPT getting lazier and telling people to read the docs instead of answering questions like before - and the team not having pinned down what’s happening - is such an amusing chapter in AI tooling.

ChatGPT

@ChatGPTapp

5 months

we've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier! we haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional. model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it 🫡

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Twitter’s idea of firing people in Europe is to lock them out of their account and call it a day. Employment lawyers are rubbing their hands, as this is not how it works. These employees get “free money” given Twitter is unable to follow local regulation. Incredible.

Martijn

@mdekuijper

1 year

7 weeks later, still no communication whatsoever

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

6 months

It was unclear who could possibly stop OpenAI from winning the AI race. We now have the answer: OpenAI themselves. The most shocking CEO firing in a decade or two.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

3 months

1. Yes it’s still operating 2. Before the 75% staff cut, this business generated ~$5B in revenue. After the cut it is likely to generate ~$2.5B 3. The savings from the firings are likely around $1-$1.5B Save $1.5 to lose $2.5 (at least the short term!) Copy at your own risk

Tobi

@mocutobi

3 months

It’s time to acknowledge that 75% of Twitter’s staff were laid off and this thing is still running

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

5 months

A thing that is causing huge pain at many tech companies in the US - with little talk about it: An IRS tax code change in Section 174. This change eliminates the ability for businesses to deduct R&D as an expense. Hear of lots of layoffs directly because of this, as a start.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Uber was founded in 2009, Datadog in 2010. 7 years ago, Uber was valued at $62B, Datadog at ~$150M. Today, Uber is valued at $63B, Datadog at $43B. Keep this in mind as you consider joining private companies with extraordinary valuations already. They might be a next Uber.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 months

I apologize but won't be amplifying startups whose mission is to fully replace software engineers with "AI devs." It's clear why VCs & investors love this idea; and why founders as well. Imagine how much money they could make if they succeed! I hate the idea of that future.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

JP Morgan bought student loan startup Frank for $175M in 2021, thinking they had 4M customers. In reality: customers were fake. The big story we should be talking about is how devs at the startup refused to generate fake students… so CEO Charlie Javice had to outsource this.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

11 months

The business model of Hindenburg Research is fascinating: They produce some of the best, in-depth investigative journalism, aiming to expose shady actors, which are *always* publicly traded companies. They do this for free: as they short the stock when they publish the report.

Hindenburg Research

@HindenburgRes

11 months

NEW FROM US: Tingo Group: Fake Farmers, Phones, and Financials—The Nigerian Empire That Isn’t (1/n)

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

@coffeebreak_YT Is Logan Paul aware that by filing a lawsuit he opens up discovery? Meaning the judge - and the public, and the victims of his scam - will have far more access to what’s really been happening. Should there be a lawsuit filed, I’m happy to chip into your legal defense costs btw.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

5 months

Turns out it’s not legal. The FTC is suing Adobe over it and it’s likely it will result in a massive fine. On top of all the lost customers for life, like me. Adobe is only the major company where I felt defrauded thanks to pricing practices.

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Adobe is running the exact same dark pattern, even now. It's just too much free money, at the expense of people who think $54.99/month means $54.99/month, and not "commit to an annual plan and pay 12x$54.99/month (or terminate for a massive penalty)." This should not be legal.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

An underrated way to attract great engineers to your company (drumroll) Have a great engineering blog. This means ENGINEERS write the blog, not content writers. And they give the "real deal" about challenges, learnings, failures. So few companies do this. A few that do:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

“So if they built it, why didn’t they ship it?” Old Twitter did things more careful & slow - both to get early feedback, and to not release half-baked features. This will clearly change. For the better in speed of release, and perhaps for worse for of quality, bugs, confusion.

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

@ascriven01 Because Old Twitter did things in phases: 1. Plan it 2. Build it 3. Test internally (I understand it was here) 4. Test with cohorts, take feedback to make it better 5. Roll out globally

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

23 days

I just realized how I’ve heard virtually nothing about the Vision Pro. I saw dozens of people on my feed pre-order it, unbox it, share first impressions. Now it’s just… nothing. Nothing good, nothing bad. It reminds me of the Microsoft HoloLens launch and subsequent… quiet.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

I’ve been saying exactly this. If you truly want to “bank the unbanked”, look to what UPI did in India, Pix in Brazil, M-Pesa in Africa - all in a few short years.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

9 months

It's now possible to block ChatGPT's crawler on any website you control. Added the block: it's a no-brainer. Why? ChatGPT cites no sources. It's a one-way relationship where OpenAI takes what is published on the internet, and then doesn't give a single reference or link back.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

3 years

An eng created a fake CV with Instagram, Zillow, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Berkeley on it, all details being nonsense. Got 60% response rate. Reddit is going wild. Me, as a hiring manager: what is surprising about any of this. It’s exactly how recruiting works. Let me explain:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

3 months

Whenever I see a UI like this I sigh: because I can tell whoever built it is an dev who doesn't care about their craft much. The card type can be inferred from the first few digits of any card, using a regex. It's a neat (and fun!) thing to code + makes for more pleasant UX.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Wanted to get an Uber at the airport. After 10 minutes of every driver canceling (drivers now have unlimited cancels) wondered if there's a better way. And there was. Walked up to the taxi stand, took a taxi, paid the same as Uber Black estimated. Rides have gone full circle.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

@EricFrohnhoefer Not before giving an extensive reply proving your point. I respect you for the response.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

All it takes for a company to lose you for life is to fool you once. I signed up to a monthly Adobe subscription, only to realized it was a *yearly* one paid monthly (?!) when I tried to cancel, and Adobe did not let me. That was it: me done with Adobe. I cannot recommend them.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

For anyone trying to make sense of Musk having Twitter engineers print out their code and show it to Tesla engineers… my view is we don’t need to look far to see what is happening. Elon doesn’t like to pay severance. From my coverage in Tesla’s secret layoffs in @Pragmatic_Eng :

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

4 months

A massive “what really matters” for me was when in 2007, I snuck into an MIT CS class (probability theory) thanks to a friend. I expected to hear something profound. But the material was almost exactly what I had studied the previous semester in my university in Hungary.

Christian Keil

@pronounced_kyle

4 months

Still blows my mind that you can take ANY MIT COURSE you want, online, for free. Machine learning? Nuclear physics? Quantum computing? All there. Truly unreal.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

11 months

Wow: Google IS killing Google Domains; selling it to Squarespace. This is 10 million domains sold. Millions of customers like me learn again (and again!) that you cannot trust Google to keep their own products alive. Show me another vendor that throws away customers like this…

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

It's times like this when it's hard to decide if Google will "kill" certain products, such as Google Domains. If it's a long-term investment: why not expand to all markets where Google Workspace is also present? If it's not a long-term investment: then why bother using it?

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 month

One of my best hires back at Uber Amsterdam was a dev from another country. Already had an intern offer elsewhere. “Why did you apply here?” “B/c this other company offered €500/mo. Renting a room + a meal a day costs ~€1,000/mo. I don’t have the money to take their offer.”

Harvard Business Review

@HarvardBiz

1 month

Let's be honest: Unpaid internships are unfair and unethical.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

As it's been ~3 years, figured I'll answer "What caused the Uber Eats glitch that allowed ordering free food for a weekend in India?" This was an outage on my watch. Given Quora is paywalled - can't post the answer w/o a sub - here's the story on idempotency & breaking changes:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

A reason I am anti "web3" is that the unregulated nature of this space means that non-accredited investors (aka people who are not rich) put money they cannot afford to lose. Then lose it in schemes that collapse, enriching founders & VCs in the process. People like these:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Google interviewing people: "Design a system that can scale to billions of users, with a p99 of 30 seconds for data replication. We ask questions like this because this is the type of work you'd do here, day-in, day-out." Also Google when changing your profile image:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

10 months

I have been increasingly surprised how Twitter kept - mostly! - functioning despite firing devs + devs quitting, not paying vendors & having trouble hiring experienced engineers. A testament to the resilience of the system built by the former team. You can only do this so long.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

18 days

And this is true. Regulation in the EU is a pain for businesses - and thus we see a lot of complaints from founders. But it’s generally very pro-resident, pro-consumer. A good example is, indeed, the Airbnb cleaning fees; prices shown with tax included etc etc

Ray Myers

@TheRayMyers

18 days

@GergelyOrosz We all love to mock EU for over regulating, but consumer rights and protections are great. Nobody from EU complains about Airbnb cleaning fees, because they are already included in the daily rate calculation.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

18 days

“It is only in the EU that it’s mandatory to display a second factor authentication for purchases over €30 (~$35). In the US, it is not. We see a LOT of fraud from US websites as a result. It’s why we proactively block cards [in our bank] with such suspicious purchases.”

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 month

Love this Verge article. Used to have HP printers until HP introduced dark patterns: the cartridge more expensive than the printer / cartridge half full but printer refuses to print / HP blocks refilled cartridges. Switched to Brother: best decision. If you’re still on HP: why?

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

4 months

Salesforce firing 10% of staff, then having two truly standout quarters, then going on a hiring spree, then freezing hiring (easy to guess how Q4 2023 went!) is such a good example of QDC. Quarterly-result Driven Company. It's the curse of many publicly traded companies.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Can we acknowledge how ridiculous it is that startups and even individuals can bankrupt themselves... ... with an AWS bill? I cannot fathom why Amazon does not do anything meaningful to allow setting e.g. limits on accounts. Why do we need to hear stories like this on repeat?

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Call me surprised. George Hotz is an experienced software engineer who volunteered to do a 12-week “internship” at Twitter to try and fix things. He seemed motivated and determined to make an impact - but threw in the towel 4 weeks in. Not a good sign for Twitter’s dev team.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Now that app-based authentication is far more common, let's talk about a major sin Google is doing: They ONLY recommend using Google authenticator. Google authenticator is one of the worst apps to use: you lose your phone, and you've lost your auth codes. Use eg Authy instead.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

I always find it interesting when engineers from other companies join and bring some of their eng culture with them. I will never forget an iOS eng from Facebook on a another team who did a PR, which code broke one of our tests, so he deleted the test & force landed changes. 🤯

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

"What if we took 2-3 months to rewrite the whole thing? Start from scratch, fix all the mistakes we know about, and we will have a clean state, all our problems solved." There's a divide between engineers who thought about doing this, and those who did it, and it's a big one.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Unless you operated large systems, it’s hard to appreciate both how they work, and how they break. Twitter won’t go down with a big b, and it won’t go down irreparable. Things will work fine for a while - thanks to no new deploys! Then, here’s what’s likely to happen (cont’d):

Jaana Dogan ヤナドガン

@rakyll

1 year

Good to hear. Having no outages means there will never be outages, no new capacity issues, no new cascading failures, no bad pushes, nothing. We will freeze in time and my tweets will go into /dev/null. I wished I was smart enough to come up with this idea at work.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

In every company I worked at, once every year or two a new joiner on a team (often internal transfer) would do something so rare: Try out all our competitors, and create a comparison table on what they did better than us, with images. Jaw-drop effect. Every. Single. Time.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Treat your career choices like you would invest your money. A friend had offers from companies A & B. My friend could not, for the life of him, understand how Company A made money. Company B he understood. Company A had a better offer. My friend still chose B (cont'd).

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Working in a large tech company, one thing I wish every team had (but barely any have it): A “map” of the teams that you depend on, that depend on you, and ones that are coupled to your work in one way or the other. One map for engineering teams; another for non-eng ones.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

“I don’t understand why X was laid off, and their manager also couldn’t tell them why.” With layoffs being more frequent, a thread about how who is let go is often decided, and why it can seem random (even though there’s a system):

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

9 months

There’s this YouTube channel that releases maybe 1-2 videos per year but they are absolute bangers. It’s called KRAZAM and it’s the only one I set to get notifications for new videos. If you work in tech, you might also find them funny & worth watching:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

When people share how crypto can bring payments to underserved communities, I ask them if they heard of UPI which did this - but without blockchain. UPI has no fees, is secure, works offline as well and 6 years after launch accounts for 60% of retail payments in India (!!)

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

The amusing thing about the $20 for verified arguments is how it shows the mess of the business model Twitter has. There’s a social media site that charges ~$59/month for a gold badge, and up to $9,000/year for power users and few ever complain. That site is called LinkedIn.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

This is next level.Nikita: built an app called tbh where teens could compliment each other, anonymously. Facebook bought the app and shut it down. Nikita vested out, then built an app called Gas where teens could compliment each other, anonymously. Discord bought the app and…

Nikita Bier

@nikitabier

1 year

Sold my company 5 years ago to the world's largest consumer app. Today I sold my company to the next largest one. Gas has been acquired by Discord.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Software engineers who write tests for their code - and ask for code reviews on it - often ship more maintainable code. Software engineers who write design docs for their architecture - and ask for reviews on it - often ship more maintainable architecture.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

To understand why layoffs are happening at Big Tech, it's not enough to understand if a company is profitable. Microsoft's profits (net income) for 2022 was at $72B: this is above the *revenue* it had every year before 2012. Layoffs have to do with shareholder's expectations:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

9 months

An interesting find: @Wise publicizes the compensation ranges for all of their engineering levels on their career site. Here is how they add up: (Cont'd)

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Performance reviews are coming up. An objective way to summarize your own achievements is to use numbers. Those numbers are facts, hard to argue with, and can be compared, should anyone want to do so. Some ideas for numbers. What else have you seen used in perf reviews?

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 months

Imagine this logic extended to other platforms: “Spotify has accessed Windows APIs X trillion times and pays nothing” “Spotify has been downloaded on Android N billion times and pays nothing.” “Spotify has been opened in Chrome N billion times and pays nothing.” Ridiculous.

Dare Obasanjo🐀

@Carnage4Life

2 months

Apple's response to it's almost $2 billion EU fine for preventing Spotify from telling users they can pay for subscriptions online is telling. The mentality comes across that if you make an iPhone app then you owe them and if you aren't paying, they just haven't collected yet.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 months

So THIS is why GM said it will no longer support Apple CarPlay from 2026?! And build their own Android experience. Because they don't want Apple to take over all the car's screens as Apple demands it does so. From the US vs Apple lawsuit:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 months

When something sounds too good to be true - maybe it is? Did Klarna really fully replace 700 customer support agents overnight? I did what few retweeting this do: tried Klarna’s AI assistant. It’s… underwhelming. It recites exact docs and passes me on to human support fast.

Tanay Jaipuria

@tanayj

2 months

Wow Klarna's AI customer support agent is able to handle 2/3rd of the requests by itself in its first month and is doing the job of an equivalent of 700 agents.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

5 months

Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers. Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles. They do not exist. Nada.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Skype went all-in on Scrum 2011-12 right as WhatsApp overtook it in market share. I asked the WhatsApp founder Jan Koum if they used it at all. His response: “To be honest i have no idea what this Scrum garbage is and we never uttered the word Scrum when i was at WhatsApp.”

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Yesterday, a frontend engineer told me that they think that modern frontend engineering is more complex than backend engineering these days. I asked this person if they've done backend engineering recently. They have not: they just had ideas on what it was like, back in the day.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Code review: Software engineer: "The variable name isn't descriptive; I'd make it more expressive." Senior sw engineer: "Suggest to not couple this class tightly for no reason." Staff sw engineer: "Why are we building from scratch over using {Service that does exactly this}?"

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

11 months

So many of the great software engineers I consider fantastic "software architects" share this one thing: They build (throwaway) prototypes to prove their point / showcase their ideas. A lot! So much easier to reason about concrete code than abstract ideas.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

3 months

Yes, Apple Pay was down, globally, for a bit over an hour. And no, neither developers nor customers will see any details on what happened, and there will be no public postmortem summary published. Apple simply doesn’t do any of this. They don’t have to - they’re Apple!

Theo - t3.gg

@t3dotgg

3 months

lmao Apple Pay is down

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

I run a one-person business. Just looked at the SaaSes I pay for: GSuite. Craft Docs. Zoom. Grammarly. Plauisble. PermanentLink. Calendly. Excalidraw. Canva. SendGrid. ConvertKit. Mailjet. GeniusLink. TubeBuddy. Feedly. GitHub. Render. MediaTemple. Netlify. Dropbox. t2mio. Wow.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Fron a software engineer: "Here's the real reason I started looking for a new job. Build times. I would spend 40-50 minutes waiting for XCode to complete a build, unable to do anything that time. Everyone told me it's just how it is. It was driving me crazy." DevEx matters...

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Netflix was groundbreaking from a tech perspective when launched (backend, mobile, DS, scale-wise etc). Netflix hired some of the best engineers to build and operate it. It still attracts great tech talent. And yet, Disney+ and HBO built similar offerings, relatively quickly.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

4 months

When I became a Google Domains customer many years ago, I did it b/c I trusted Google. Google has now made me - and 10 million other domain holders - Squarespace customers. No consent asked, no reasoning given. Google prints money yet sold Domains. I can no longer trust Google.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Wow. @SubstackInc experimented with pricing, reducing it by 1 cent, so e.g. instead of $10/month, do $9.99/month. The result? A significant decrease for the pricing ending with .99. Which goes against conventional pricing wisdom!! Why it's worth running experiments!

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

I'm going to be clear: I never saw - or imagined to see - a tech company *deliberately* creating such a toxic culture. This is coming from someone who worked at Uber during intense times. But we did not have random firings, a sense of zero job security, or comparable madness.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Amazon is hiring in Nigeria / Lagos to relocate to Canada / Ireland and US (this latter I’m pretty sure is marketing given H1B cap is filled for 2022). Three reasons it’s worth paying attention to this hiring event - and, in general, how Amazon hires - hiring managers in tech:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

I want to call out that all things considered, the way Stripe is doing layoffs set a new bar. 1. Generous severance and more support than most places give. 2. Transparent on WHY this happened and the mistakes leadership made 3. alumni. stripe. com email addresses created.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

I confirmed the above details with current Twitter software engineers and managers. Line managers were unaware of the performance warnings sent out. This "performance warning" is a PIP that can result in firing. As a reminder, devs went through all this before in 3 weeks:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

You'd think that tech startups with $1B, $4B, $6B, $10B, $17B valuations operate pretty well. In reality, many of these places are held together by duct tape. When inside: you can barely believe it. It's also why they pay the big bucks to hire people who sort lots of this out.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

I really am off for the day. For the rest of the happenings at Twitter; I suggest following @CaseyNewton and @ZoeSchiffer and subscribe to @platformer (I’m a paid subscriber). The best summary of all the craziness happening. Like this, right now:

Zoë Schiffer

@ZoeSchiffer

1 year

Elon Musk is also asking for up 10 screenshots of the "most salient lines of code" from Twitter engineers 2/

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

One of the most underrated languages to learn - that is surprisingly fast to do: SQL. The language has a handful of operators. They take some - but not too much - time to understand and master. Once you know how to join, group, union, create a view: that’s all you need really.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

3 years

One of the perks of no longer working at big tech, and having no plans to go back: I can write *very* honestly about some of the negative stuff I've seen. Stuff I would definitely not write about in public if I was still a manager at Uber. Like Promotion Driven Development:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

I confirmed that several Twitter engineers slept in the office over the weekend in effort to make the Wednesday deadline to build the verification feature. A lot of these messages are not ironic: they’re real. It’s understood that those not performing could well be laid off.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

What no one is talking about: Visual Studio is arguably the best IDE, costing $1,500-8,000/year/seat. Then Microsoft decided to build Visual Studio Code, and give it away for free. ~75% of *all* developers now use VS Code, globally. What a brilliant strategy by Microsoft.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

Week 1: 50% of their colleagues were fired - and some of these people as well. Week 2: Some of them were called back. RTO mandated: Week 3: all of them clicked “yes” to longer hours, all while the majority of devs resigned. Week 4: now. So, so cruel.

Cruel Changes at Twitter

The speedrun for a complete culture overhaul at Twitter continues, and may conclude just two weeks after Elon Musk bought the company. Managers will have 20+ reports and are expected to code at least...

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

I'm consistently surprised by how the single act of doing this as an eng manager or product manager makes incredible waves: Send an email explaining what your team did the past 1-2 weeks, what your plans are for the next period, blockers & lessons learned. Every. Single. Time.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

This is hilarious. Aldi created an Amazon-like “grab and go, zero staff” store in the Netherlands. Except no customers enter b/c to do so, you need to register *with a credit card*. The majority of the population in the Netherlands doesn’t have a credit card! They have debit.

Jelle Prins

@jelleprins

1 year

Aldi introduced an Amazon-like store in The Netherlands. You can grab your groceries and walk out. Cameras register what you take & auto-charge your creditcard. Zero friction. Except in a country where ppl don’t have creditcards & your app sucks 🤦🏻‍♂️

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

As per @ZoeSchiffer , the number of fired software engineers could be around 50. These are 50 engineers who would have gotten an additional 2 months’ severance had they refused to commit to the “hardcore” Twitter. Why give worse packages to those believing in “Twitter 2.0”?

Zoë Schiffer

@ZoeSchiffer

1 year

Hearing that roughly 50 Twitter engineers were abruptly fired last night and dozens more received warnings:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

"I started at a new job as a sr software engineer 3 months ago and love it. However, my former manager is trying to get me to join the new startup they founded. They just got into YC and is telling me I would get a handsome stock option allocation. I'm conflicted." My take:

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

4 years

For the record, at Uber, we're moving many of our microservices to what @copyconstruct calls macroservices (wells-sized services). Exactly b/c testing and maintaining thousands of microservices is not only hard - it can cause more trouble long-term than it solves the short-term.

Cindy Sridharan

@copyconstruct

4 years

- Microservices are hard. - Building reliable and testable microservices is a lot harder than most folks think - Effectively *testing* microservices requires a ton of tooling and foresight. - A Netflix/Uber style microservices isn't required by many (most?) orgs. - Macroservices?

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

7 months

Most corp compliance training: boring, but I need to do it. At Microsoft: glued to the screen watching it, thinking to myself: "WTF? Did this really happen?" The difference: MS did a video with a former MS employee sentenced to jail for breaking the law. It was... educational.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

Another day, another now former Amazon software engineer sharing how Amazon put them through hell thanks to a meritless PIP which was the set up so they would fail and be fired. Amazon has a 6% target to fire people and they do. Every single year. And yet few people know this.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

I know today has lots of gloomy news on layoffs, so here's something more positive: 93,000 employees - including SWEs - working at Mercedes-Benz awoke to some great news: every one of them is getting a €7,300 bonus (about $7,900) on top of the "regular" bonuses.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 months

Dare criticize Apple and they can (and, sometimes, will!) remove you from their platform as a developer. They just did this w Epic! I cannot remember even Microsoft being this much of a bully back in the 90s. Apple became the very thing they fought against in 1984. Shameful.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

I'm observing more and more startups choose a 'TypeScript stack' for their tech: - Node.JS w TypeScript on the backend - React with TypeScript on the frontend - Some standard enough API approach (eg GraphQL) This is both easy to hire for + easy to pick up for any developer.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

2 years

One very strange thing that happened to me at Skype, where we went all-in on Scrum and 2-week sprints: Sprint burnout. I got tired of the retro & planning every 2 weeks. That as soon as we finished a sprint, we'd start a new one. Got this feeling about 8 months into sprints.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

React Native has come a long way and Blue_sky is a testament that choosing this tech (or another cross-platform one like Flutter) is sensible for many startups over starting native. Blue_sky is on iOS and Android, performance is excellent, and built by 1 engineer (!!)

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

“We just had shadow layoffs, and the number of PRs and number of design docs seemed to count into who was ranked as a low performer and let go. So now people are creating tons of PRs - eg 1 PR/unit test - and design docs for every tiny change.” Not surprising, and yet tragic.

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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

How things come full circle. Remember when Slack came out, it felt like a productivity increase and something that works better than email. I’ve now resorted to keeping Slack closed most of the time to not get distracted, preferring email as it doesn’t force me to respond ASAP.

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