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Gergely Orosz

16 Feb, 9 tweets, 6 min read

The 12 most important pieces of information and concepts I wish I knew about equity, as a software engineer.

A thread.

1. Equity is something Big Tech and high-growth companies award to software engineers at all levels. The more senior you are, the bigger the ratio can be:

2. Vesting, cliffs, refreshers, and sign-on clawbacks.

If you get awarded equity, you'll want to understand vesting and cliffs. A 1-year cliff is pretty common in most places that award equity.

Read more in this blog post I wrote: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/equity-for-sof…

3. Stock options / ESOPs.

The most common form of equity compensation at early-stage startups that are high-growth.

And there are *so* many pitfalls you'll want to be aware of. You need to do your research on this: I can't do justice in a tweet.

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/equity-for-sof…

4. RSUs (Restricted Stock Units)

A common form of equity compensation for publicly traded companies and Big Tech. One of the easier types of equity to understand: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/equity-for-sof…

5. Double-trigger RSUs. Typically RSUs for pre-IPO companies. I got these at Uber.

6. ESPP: a (typically) amazing employee perk at publicly traded companies. There's always risk, but this plan can typically offer good upsides.

7. Phantom shares. An interesting setup similar to RSUs... but you don't own stocks. Not frequent, but e.g. Adyen goes with this plan.

7. SARs - similar to phantom stocks. A few EU tech startups I know of use them.

8. Growth shares. A more exotic equity type. Skyscanner awarded these kinds of shares.

More: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/equity-for-sof…

10. Dilution. What is almost certain to happen with options/shares with new fundraising rounds. Not much you can do: but be aware.

11. Taxes. The only certainty with equities is you needing to deal with this. Talk with an expert. This is important.

12. Equity carries plenty of risk and you *can* lose money - not just gain.

WeWork. Zenefits. Good Technologies. FanDuel. All cautionary examples.

Until you've cashed in your equity, it can evaporate. Keep this in mind.

Full article: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/equity-for-sof…

And finally:

Most companies do not equity for software engineers. Big Tech and high-growth tech startups are ones who typically do.

But how do you get into these places? I don't have the answers, but have a few thoughts I'll send out in email form Subscribe here: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/tech-interview…

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More from @GergelyOrosz

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

3 Feb

Building well-performing (native) mobile apps: a thread.

As I'm writing the chapter on mobile performance in Building Mobile Apps at Scale, I'm doing a lot of reading on this topic.

A collection of the 9 most interesting iOS and Android app performance pieces.

@LinkedInEng

1. Building a blazing fast Android app from @LinkedInEng: engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/buil…

I love this overview: it seems so... simple. Try doing it and you realize it's far from it. Iterating *so* key for a performant mobile app.

Bonus: they use Nanoscope! (cc: @LelandTakamine )

2. Grab speeding up their "super app": engineering.grab.com/journey-to-a-f…

Pretty cool to see the top "lower hanging fruit" they saw: app startup, tile caching, animations, binary optimizations, and detecting performance regressions.

A years' work summarized in a short article.

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Gergely Orosz

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25 Jan

Writing is one of the best things you can invest in, as a software engineer. The more experienced people become, the more they tend to realize this.

Here's a thread on the 6 best writing resources I've found - both to "convince" you to write more and to help you "level up":

1. My extended thoughts on why writing is an undervalued software engineering skill, and the tools (Grammarly, Hemmingway) and books (Writing Well, Sense of Style) that helped me improve my writing.

Writing becomes *so* important at larger companies.

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/on-writing-wel…

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2. It's time to start writing by @alexnixon_uk . I like the story about making a technical decision, gathering around to talk.

What if they wrote instead? It would be more durable, scalable, and - with COVID - much more feasible.

alexnixon.github.io/2019/12/10/wri…

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Gergely Orosz

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23 Jan

How do you bring up the topic of promotions with your manager?

My 7 pieces of advice (thread)
1. Understand how proms work at your company.
2. Talk with your manager: get them on your side. If you don't bring it up: don't expect it to happen.

2. (Cont'd) It's in all managers' interest to have people promoted who are already performing at the next level. Makes the manager look good! You're on the same team.
3. Be realistic about what it takes to be promoted above the senior levels. These are usually far more difficult.

4. Set goals to "close the gap" that you have compared to the next level. Act like you would like if you had the title. Keep a work log.
5. Find a mentor within the company. Ask for regular feedback.

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Gergely Orosz

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17 Jan

A list of tech companies and their experimentation platforms. If you're an engineer and use (or want to use) experimentation / AB tests/feature flags, this is worth a read. A thread.

1. Uber. Lots of articles on Uber's engineering blog, from the platform itself (eng.uber.com/experimentatio…), through analyzing outcomes (eng.uber.com/analyzing-expe…) and a talk on decoupling experimentation logs from business metrics (conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-…)

2. Doordash. Reading most of this was "deja vu: this is *so* similar to what we are doing at Uber!" It's a good writeup : doordash.engineering/2020/09/09/exp…

Considering how fast Doordash went from <10% market share to market leader in the US, they definitely know how to experiment well.

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Gergely Orosz

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14 Jan

One of the challenges at Uber was building monitoring and alerting that worked reliably.

The problem was how Uber was (is) city-based and global alerting would not catch regional (city/country-level issues).

Two stories on why this is difficult:

1. A PayPal employee on a Japan business trip alerted us in 2016 that PayPal is not working there. He was right: it wasn’t working for 2+ months, across the country. How did we miss it?

There were 20 PayPal trip attempts/day only, and Japan was one of 60+ countries.

In the global scale, this accounted for a tiny fraction.

So we did what makes sense: added country-level alerting.

First, this became a data cardinality problem. 1,000 cities x 15 payment methods... not trivial to track all. We settled on countries & top cities.

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Gergely Orosz

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“Why does {company/app} have more than X engineers?” where X typically greater than 20/50/100.

Here’s how and why this makes sense for *the company* from a business-point of view. A thread.

1. What you see as “one app” is indeed, a lot of small parts that all contribute to the company making money.

Take the Twitter app. Almost all functionality (timeline, lists, profile, moments etc) are here to drive engagement. Then there’s ads and ad tools (I’m simplifying ofc)

2. A company never asks “how many engineers do we need overall?” They look at business cases.

“If we hire 4 engineers, we can build Lists. We expect to reduce churn by 4% annually which results in $15M/yr revenue. The cost of this team is A LOT less than this.”

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