The Pragmatic Engineer

A weekly column with advice, observations, and inspiration across the software engineering industry. Especially relevant for software engineers and engineering managers at Big Tech and startups, useful for those working in tech.

The #1 technology newsletter on Substack.

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Writing

mobile.dev

mobile.dev solves this problem of needing to build in-house with a best-in-class platform. The platform already enables companies to catch performance problems pre-production, but this is just the first stepping stone. We have big plans on becoming the go-to toolkit for any team that cares about quality apps.

We’re hiring for the first few founding engineers in the US - for Infrastructure, Android, and iOS Leads. Read more details on these in the first comment - feel free to message me if you have questions or are interested! https://angel.co/company/mobile-dev-inc/jobs

Advisor

TravelPerk

TravelPerk is the leading B2B travel management scaleup in Europe.  I'm involved in helping the company grow, balancing delighting customers, executing rapidly, and building with reliability and maintainability in mind.

Advising the team building the world’s first developer experience management platform, and doing it the right way.

Independent

Writing The Software Engineer's Guidebook (https://www.engguidebook.com/). Published Mobile Apps at Scale (https://mobileatscale.com/), Growing as a Mobile Engineer (https://www.mobileatscale.com/growing) and The Tech Resume Inside Out (https://thetechresume.com).

Building TechPays (http://techpays.com) to bring transparency to tech compensation in Europe.

Things on the side

Plato 

Volunteered my time with one-on-one conversations with engineering leads, discussing the challenges they face.

I quit Plato when I realized that of the $300+/month subscription Plato charges mentees, 100% goes to Plato, and none of it to charity. I asked Plato to donate my take rate for a good cause, which they refused to do so.

Mentor

Uber

Headed up Payments Experience Platform group, a cross-platform, backend, web, and native mobile group of about 25 engineers. Built Uber Wallet. Created the Web Payments team, who are building all next-generation experiences for paying for Uber products, across all web surfaces. Manager for Uber Pay towards the end of my tenure.

Challenges included building and operating a payments platform processing $65B in 2019, scaling services to thousands of QPS, building an easy-enough to extend platform, having a magical UX that always works, and delivering more, and faster, while dealing with migration hell that is typical for a company in hypergrowth.

Engineering Manager, Payments Experience Platform

Making sure people can pay for their ride with Uber doesn't sound that exciting. Until you realize $2B+ is on the line every month, in 70+ countries, with more than a dozen payment methods.

Worked with a nimble, cross-platform, backend/iOS/Android engineering team, growing from 5 to 15 people. We balanced building new ways to pay that often meant $100M+ in annual revenue and keeping everything running - without losing our sanity.

Some of the things we launched this time were AMEX, Google Pay, Venmo, Brazil debit cards and iDEAL. And we somehow managed to find time to help rewrite the Driver app, do some interesting security-related work and made time to ship a few improvements initiated by people on the team - which added tens of millions to the bottom line.

These were really fun times.

Engineering Manager, Rider Payments

Rewrote the Uber app, leading the payments features rewrite both on iOS & Android. We did what many engineers would advise against: started from scratch, bet on a new language without mature tooling support (Swift 2.2 at the time) and started over with a new architecture to be shared between iOS and Android (RIB architecture). We did of this in a hustle, with less than 6 months from the first line of code to shipping globally.

We now have an app where a hundred different program teams and thousands of engineers can build quality features quickly and innovate within the app, without compromising the core experience and iOS and Android share the same code architecture, class names, business logic and platform components.

Senior Software Engineer, Payment Providers Platform

Skyscanner

Built Skyscanner TravelPro, a B2B travel product that we positioned to disrupt the way companies and people book their travel. I hired, built up & led the mobile team for this product, shipping the iOS app. We moved fast, built a polished MVP in 8 months, validated it with a few first active customers and iterated on the next version for the following 6 months. Ultimately, we did not have the right product-market fit and merged the learnings, team and product back into Skyscanner.

Principal Software Engineer

Skype

Part of the founding team for Skype Xbox One, building it from the first line of code written to shipping to millions of people on launch day. Some interesting challenges included building a navigation framework for all controllers, voice, and gesture and performance challenges in resource-constrained scenarios.

Afterwards joined the Skype Web team and built web.skype.com, a competitor to Google Hangouts at the time. Rolled out an earlier version of web calling to all 400 million Outlook.com users, implementing solutions to handle load a scalable way.

Software Engineer

Team Distinction (Acquired by Skyscanner)

Built some of the highest-rated applications on Windows Phone like Cocktail Flow, Weather Flow and AppFlow in the evenings and weekends. Later ported Cocktail Flow to Windows 8, iOS, and Android together with Distinction where it is one of the most popular drinks apps (just search for "cocktail" on the app store). These apps had over 15M downloads and above 200K DAU at their peak.

Mobile App Development (Side Projects)

I write The Pragmatic Engineer, the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. This is my full-time focus, after having left Uber, where I was a software engineer and engineering manager. Before Uber, I worked at Skyscanner, Skype, JP Morgan and smaller companies.

I've published the books Building Mobile Apps at Scale, Growing as a Mobile Engineer, and am writing The Software Engineer's Guidebook.

Read more about what I do at pragmaticengineer.com.

Sponsorship, affiliates or advertising: I don't do any form of this. Read more here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/sponsor 

My ethics statement: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ethics-statement/

WOW. Six months after release, The Software Engineer's Guidebook has sold more than 25,000 copies. This is far beyond what I hoped for - especially since it's a self-published book!

It's funny how things work out in the end. I *really* wanted this book to have a "proper" publisher and spent 6 months pitching to "traditional" tech book publishers and working with them. However, 2 our of the 3 publishers I originally pitched this exact book passed on it, and the third one pushed for changes that would have drastically altered the book in ways I disagreed with. I made the (at the time, very difficult and risky) call to break the contract with this publisher, and write the book in the original form I envisioned it - and the only way I could see it work. 

It's been weighing on me since: what if that publisher was right, and the concept would not work, and their well-meaning suggestions to "dumb down" the book would have been the way to go? I'm relieved that this was not the case, in the end.

The audiobook is now in the works, as well as translation to 7 languages (German, Korean, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hungarian and Mongolian).

Thank you to everyone who has picked up a copy of the book (or the e-book!) This is all thanks to you 🙌

More on the book here: https://lnkd.in/gq2722ZF

Gergely Orosz

The Pragmatic Engineer Job Board and Talent Collective was reasonably successful by all conventional metrics. And yet, after 2.5 years of operation, I am retiring it for good. Here's what happened:

Short version:

The tech jobs industry is changing, a lot. Job boards are becoming more and more useless/noisy. The "best candidates" are no longer signalling their availability. Looking ahead, platforms like LinkedIn Recruiter look to be winners, alongside specialized tech job firms. Business was ok, but on a stable decline. This move was kind of overdue on my end.

Longer version:

The trigger for all of this was how the vendor I was using to run the job board and talent collective - Pallet - retired the platform I used. They decided to pivot to a search firm approach. For everything I understand, this was absolutely the right decision from them.

Pallet started out as a job board. However, early 2022, the startup innovated with the concept of a "talent collective." 

The core insight Pallet had was how people trust "creators" – and how these "creators" already have engaged audiences.

I was personally reviewing every candidate application: and for the ones that I approved, I added a note on why this profile is interesting or standout – often adding details that I assumed some recruiters could miss (such as open source contributions, mentoring outside of work, or interesting and relevant extracurricular activities that I found encouraging to see.)

My job board had an (initial) advantage of lots of qualified candidates applying. My job board was not a standalone board: but it was interesting tech jobs listed at the bottom of my blog and newsletter. As such, companies initially received lots of qualified candidates.

Still, the majority of companies working with me never posted a single job! They went for the Talent Collective instead and contacted vetted, senior+ engineers there instead. About 80% of my customers were like this.

So why did Pallet decide to shut the board down? It was probably down to two broader trends:

#1: "Creators" stopped running their Pallet job boards and talent collectives. 

In early 2022, YouTubers and newsletter writers started to run their Pallet boards by the dozens. As I look back now, about 90% of the people I remembered having a Pallet stopped maintaining it and using it about a year ago.

#2: Interest in job boards/talent collectives declined, even as traffic displaying these offerings increased. 

Here are statistics on traffic that ended up on my job board (when people clicked through from my newsletters and blog): and how traffic across my newsletter and blog changed over the same time:

There are a few more reasons - including how automated AI application tools will, most certainly make job boards less useful, and others. Continue reading on my blog: https://lnkd.in/eZnhqRzu

This is the reality of experimenting with different things: some work, until they don't. Like now!

There are truths that are widely known by insiders; not particularly a secret; and yet rarely ever written down. Here is one:

Hiring processes for CTOs, Head of Engineering, VPE or Sr VPE are all bespoke/different between companies. To the point of wildly different from how the company hires for any other non-executive role!

I’ve been talking with folks interviewing for CTO and Head of Engineering positions the past few months, and this is absolutely what they are seeing. The only shared characteristic is how these days processes are longer than before. Outside of that: there are processes that are 10+ interviews long (with more and more people brought in); ones heavy on references; ones where the board vetoes candidates / pushes candidates through and so on. There is no “standard” process at those levels.

Here’s this articulated in Will Larson’s latest book, The Engineering Executive’s Primer:

(I’m enjoying the book so far. Get it here from the publisher: https://lnkd.in/e8KabBaS )

🇪🇨 From Ecuador to Germany: Meet Fernando G.! 🇩🇪 

I’m excited to share the inspiring career journey of my client, Fernando Guerra, who secured a fantastic role in Germany and relocated with his family there from Ecuador!
 
Fernando discovered my career development services through Gergely Orosz post last year which mentioned the launch of my company, Expat Career Development.

It was Fernando's dream to build his career abroad in software engineering 🌍

Together we embarked on a transformative journey focusing on:

✔️ Refining his resume and LinkedIn profile
✔️ Interview preparation 
✔️ Professional branding + networking
✔️ Navigating the European job market
✔️ Mastering salary negotiation strategies.

Within just a few months, he secured a fantastic role at a company in Germany!! 

His success story exemplifies the power of perseverance and strategic career planning.

Are you ready to embark on your own career journey? 

Let's connect today and make it happen! 💼

#ExpatCareerDevelopment  #CareerDevelopmentCoaching
---------------------
Are you seeking career guidance?
I offer 1:1 career coaching for professionals of all backgrounds.
Follow me for career tips 🔔

When were you born? Asking to get a sense of what "generational cohorts" are most active here, on LinkedIn:

Yesterday we had an amazing meetup in Booking.com for the 6th AMS Chapter event. 

👏 A big thank you to everyone who joined us last night and a special thank you to Gergely Orosz for bringing the insightful and engaging conversation.

Shout out to our Amsterdam Local Chapter leaders Tarik Kilic and Mehmet Sencer KARADAYI for their outstanding efforts in organizing this special gathering. 

Looking forward to the next meetup in Amsterdam!

For more photos please check the ELC Album here: https://lnkd.in/gvYRXrjk 

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