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Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

7 Mar

In the best engineering organizations, engineers tend to get a lot of support from managers. And it works!

But I've yet to see a place that gave *proper* support for the frontline managers supporting their teams. It works for a while: until these managers burn out and leave.

"Proper support":
- Mentors in the org for line managers
- Team meetings with the "manager team" that's both a safe space to vent, and to take action
- Involving EMs in top-down decisions that will hit their teams
- Running retrospectives with the EMs, and acting on them

While I know a *lot* of frontline engineering managers who are amazing at taking care of their team, managers of managers and directors suddenly "forget" to do the same with their EMs.

Directors will often assume EMs don't need this. On the medium- and long-term: they would.

Read 4 tweets

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

25 Feb

@prezi

The engineering career framework for @prezi, with typical post-college experience years of experience, as shared by their former CTO. He's talking about what makes for a good software eng growth framework.

They settled on 6 levels to allow for enough space for growth.

They created an internal tool so people can browse definitions & examples, and for people to be able to rate themselves.

Engineers started to rate themselves, and use it as a starting point for career conversations with managers.

It worked out FAR better than they expected.

Promotions, merit increases are pretty standard (note to self: I'll share some details on this for non-EMs).

Promo committees are what you'd expect from a "modern" tech company their size.

Uber used to have more eng-heavy, as well as more manager-heavy committees:

Read 4 tweets

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

25 Feb

Today’s episode of of practical software engineering tips & tricks: load testing 3rd party services/APIs in prod.

Aka how we made sure Uber’s payments providers would also be ready for the New Years Eve surge in the early years. A thread.

Up to around 2018, Uber saw a 5-10x traffic spike on NYE. Funny enough the spike would become the new “baseline” traffic for the next September.

But the first few years this spoke would nearly cripple the company. So we started preparing ahead of time and load testing the fall.

After we’d load test most internal services and ensure they’d cope, the next failure vector: 3rd party services.

We knew what would happen on NYE and were on standby. They had no clue and though assured over email they can take a 10x load... let’s say it wasn’t always the case.

Read 6 tweets

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

24 Feb

For anyone looking for their first job in tech: it’s a beast to get - including the first in a new country.

The story of how I was a week or two away from leaving the UK, failing to get *any* response from recruiters, despite having years of work exp and a stellar CV. Thread.

I’m from Hungary and graduated top of the class at Budapesti Műszaki Egyetem with a degree in Technical Informatics. You probably never heard of it: neither have recruiters.

It’s the #1 CS college nationwide - perhaps phrasing it like this might have helped.

I worked fulltime for 2 years as a web (.NET) developer and placed #3 worldwide at Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008 - from 200K contestants.

A pretty good resume, if I might say so.

Odd enough, applying remotely for .NET positions in the UK for no responses. So I packed up and moved.

Read 11 tweets

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

22 Feb

Preparing for a meetup tomorrow on engineering your CV.

A reminder that there are things that could matter just as much as your skills:
- Your location (for many companies, still)
- Referrals
- Visas

The less senior you are & the more "local" the company, the more these matter.

The meetup is this one: meetup.com/Tech-on-the-Ty…

And the graphics are from my book thetechresume.com (free for any engineer currently out of a job).

You might wonder "why bother applying for local companies or ones that don't support visas when many of Big Tech does"

Well, one important part: competition. The companies hiring worldwide, offering remote work? They'll see a huge number of candidates & it's hard to stand out.

Read 4 tweets

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

16 Feb

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…

Read 9 tweets

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