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Gergely Orosz Profile picture
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13 Dec, 20 tweets, 11 min read
If you work in tech, #TechTwitter is the place to learn, keep up to date and get inspired.

Follow the right people and you learn something new every day.

Here are 20 tech folks I always pay attention to. They tweet no fluff. Plus details on what to expect when following them:
1. @johncutlefish. One of the most inquisitive thinkers in product management. Asks questions that we should all be asking.

Tweets about: the beautiful mess of product management, engineering and the art of getting things done.

Sample of what to expect:
2. @rakyll long-time principal engineer at Google, now at AWS.

As an engineer, I just nod to almost all tweets of hers. They hit too close to home.

Tweets about: software engineering, engineering culture, and hard truths.

Sample of what to expect:
3. @Carnage4Life, product at Meta.

Tweets about: life at big tech, product management, corporate life, FinTech, and things that make little sense in the world yet most people gloss over them.

Sample of what to expect:
4. @mipsytipsy CTO @honeycombio

Made talking about going back to engineering from management cool ("the engineer/manager pendulum")
Tweets about: engineering culture, observability, to deploy on Fridays, unfiltered thoughts (literally)

What to expect:
5. @shreyas: formerly product at Stripe, Twitter, Google.

Some of the best takes on (product) management I read in Twitter threads.

Tweets about: tech mental models, product management, strategy, corporate life, big tech, startups

What to expect:
6. @bryanl VP, principal engineer at VMWare.

We need more real talk like Bryan talks on topics related to engineering, big tech, staff+ levels.

Tweets about: life advice, career advice, big tech, engineering culture, advice for staff+ engineer levels.

7. @patio11 built Stripe Atlas from the get-go and did startups before.

Tweets about: big tech, startups, salary negotiation, payments, and unexpected stuff that repeatedly blows my mind

What to expect:
8. @techgirl1908 - founder of @TestAutomationU (100K engineers strong), Java Champion, inventor of dozens of patents.

Tweets about: career advice (including for beginners), helping people succeed, real talk about working in tech.

9. @lennysan - writing the most-read product newsletter (one of my favorites), formerly PM at Airbnb
If you’re in product, you’ll know him.

Tweets about: growth, marketplaces, product tactics and strategies, and writing a newsletter.

What to expect:
10. @danluu. An experienced engineer working in Silicon Valley.

Come for the tweets, stay for his blog.

Writes about: software engineering, fallacies, theories, observations, career.

Sample of what to expect:
11. @b0rk former Stripe engineer who creates the best Zines related to programming.

Tweets about: interesting stuff she is thinking/researching about that might or might not later turn into Zine.

Sample of what to expect:
12. @NovallSwift - a software engineer at Apple.

One of my favorite accounts for being genuine and interesting at the same time.

Tweets about: software engineering, best practices, culture.

Sample of what to expect:
13. @kelseyhightower from working at McDonald’s to one of the most respected people in cloud computing.

The NYT covered his story better than a tweet could: protocol.com/enterprise/kel…

Tweets about: learnings, software engineering, career, life advice

14. @jeanqasaur - founder/CEO of a cool observability startup.

A fresh voice on building the next generation of developer tools.

Tweets about: software engineering, standards, startups, big tech.

15. @Appyg99 Uber Eats alumni now building a startup and being open about the blood, sweat, the tears - and the joy.

Tweets about: startup life, career, and keeping it real

16. @lpolovets Software engineer turned VC
Because if you work in software, you’ll probably wonder one day “could I/should I be a VC?” Follow to find out.

Tweets about: the life of a VC, advice, business insights.

A few favorites that aren't all work:
17. @femkesvs: design+life. My former colleague at Uber.
18. @nikitabier: you never know if tweets are serious or not.
19. @EmmaBostian: life of a Spotify engineer in beautiful Sweden
20. @EmilyKager: funny videos on (serious) stuff in tech
There are, of course, many other people worth following: who are others you'd recommend to do so?

Finally: if you’re an engineering manager or software engineer: I write a weekly newsletter you’ll probably enjoy. Over 28K people in tech do. Sign up here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Correction: Jaana is a principal engineer at Amazon, was a staff engineer at Google. My bad on the title - the excellent tweets stand (see for yourself).

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More from @GergelyOrosz

Gergely Orosz Profile picture
15 Dec
"I just got a 12% raise at my company as part of the regular pay adjustment. It's because my director noticed someone in the same role made this much more than I do."

A real story, and a common one. Let me tell you how compensation and open salaries at Netflix work in practice:
1. Pay. Netflix pays top of the market... in cash. No equity (although you can ask for it). No bonuses. Just cash. A LOT of it.

How much? As much as competitors (Google, Meta, Amazon) etc pay and they move upwards with them when needed.
2. (Kind of) open compensation. Everyone who is at director or above at Netflix can see the compensation of *every* other Netflix employee - upwards as well. It's all cash, so they see one (big) number.

We're talking 1,000+ people. Unheard of at any other similar size company.
Read 7 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
15 Dec
“As someone working in tech, how can I get into angel investing?”

I’ve made ~10 angel investments the past months and here’s how I went about it (thread)

1. Big tech alumni. After I quit Uber I got invited to the Uber alumni investment club. Huh? So apparently these exist
1. (Cont’d) Facebook has one, Uber has one, and a bunch of other companies (even smaller ones). They’re places you can see deals come in, and put in from very small checks.

Granted this was lucky, but seeing dozens of pitches over months was helpful in learning on the side.
2. Help founders/startups without expectations.

My first investment came well after I talked with a founder from my network, offering advice, help and feedback as it was an area I was experienced in. When they later raised, I offered to join in, and it made perfect sense.
Read 8 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
13 Dec
An inconvenient fact: the most practical - and a very commonly used - use case for cryptocurrencies is to run Ponzi schemes, and cash in from them.

Someone creates a new currency, promotes it, and those getting in early make massive profits, at the expense of later customers.
Ponzi schemes are typically banned by governments when too many people lose money - which eventually always happens.

The unregulated and cross-border nature of crypto is the reason these schemes can go ahead.

A history of Ponzi schemes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P…
An example of a Ponzi scheme is Techlead creating a coin that has all characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. There's no value in it beyond buying early enough, then selling it.

The person making a profit of millions? Who created this useless coin: Techlead.

Read 4 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
12 Dec
I cannot shake the similarities between the Dotcom Boom and web3:
- Huge hype
- A technology most people don’t understand
- Few practical/real-world use cases
- Incredible returns in the span of months (then: IPOs. Now: tokens)
- Lots of naysayers
- Celebs/influencers involved
For the Dotcom Boom, there was the Dotcom Bust.

It’s impossible to predict if this will follow: but I do predict a crypto winter. All crypto startups need hypergrowth in users/revenue to survive & success depends on mainstream adoption.

I expect some adoption: not mainstream.
Some characteristics are similar:

Dotcom Boom companies paid a *lot* more for employees, with the expectation of becoming millionaires in 6-18 months.

Same thing is driving the hiring success for web3 companies who are burning cash like there’s no tomorrow, paying above market:
Read 8 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
12 Dec
One very interesting trend I’m hearing: everyone is struggling to hire senior engineers, designers, tech leads.

Except.

Some well-funded web3 projects that are smashing it thanks to excitement, cash compensation + (token)upside.

Keen to learn more on this. (DMs also open)
A huge difference to early-stage startup hiring vs early-stage web3 hiring: equity. Startup equity is illiquid till exit (5-10 years)

web3 tokens are liquid as soon as they vest.

Solana founding employees 100x’d in a year, those joining in July already 10x’d. And they can sell!
How do some of these places hire? The opposite of big tech:

“They found me over Discord after they saw my open source contributions. Two chats with founders, no Leetcode. Offered 500% (!!) more than what I make, in USDC. I saw no reason to not accept and now I kinda like it.”
Read 5 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
11 Dec
The biggest challenge the software engineering industry has today is not related to engineering.

It's related to teaching.

How can we train (very) junior engineers to get to a level where they are autonomous enough, in a reasonable timeframe? Can we do this in a remote setting?
All the while in the industry, the most experienced engineers are busy building the next framework that does an incrementally better job than before and adds another layer of complexity.

What if these people - naturally suited to teach - would be incentivized in doing so?
You don't need to look further than web development to see the contradiction.

Take React.

The API is ever-changing. Documentation is lacking. Onboarding is non-existent. Junior engineers are overwhelmed trying to learn the ever-changing React as their first frontend framework.
Read 9 tweets

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