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Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Gergely Orosz
@GergelyOrosz
Writing @Pragmatic_Eng, the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Author of @EngGuidebook. Formerly Uber & Skype.
Michael Hood Profile picture Eduardo Pontes Profile picture Finn the Human Profile picture Perpetual Mind Profile picture sirshannon Profile picture 31 subscribed
Apr 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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: “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.”
Apr 15 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A good thread.

Short past tenure is less of a blocker for up to sr eng positions IME.

Not having had a *single* ~3+ year gig can become a blocker for staff+ levels, though. Because "how can we trust you can build for the long run if you've never stayed long around to find out?" All of this is highly dependent on what the candidate pool looks like for a company hiring.

In the "hottest ever" tech jobs market in 2020-2022, none of this mattered.

Now, with plenty of staff+ folks having this kind of past tenure (at one point): it starts to, a lot more.
Apr 12 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. When it becomes available I’ll probably get one with a 14-day return. If I don’t get value out of it… just return.

Safe to assume it’s happening at bulk. $3,500 is too expensive to be a dust holder for days
Apr 5 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Marissa Mayer raising $20M for her startup, and getting ~1,000 installs with her well-known persona shows how it is REALLY hard to build a “hit app” in 2024. Like 100x as hard as 10 years ago. What worked in 2012 (“just build an app!” clearly doesn’t:

Via @platformer: Image Full article:

The only person I’ve seen to be able to repeatedly pull off launching a hit B2C *app-only* launch in the 2020s is @nikitabier. And he has plans, strategies, and is obsessed with viral loops & understands today’s users (+FOMO)platformer.news/marissa-mayer-…
Apr 3 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Hear me out:

What if the single best use case for GenAI / LLM is in the coding domain? Code generation, autocomplete, debugging assist etc. Thanks to coding being one of the very few places where

1. Training data is plentiful

2. Hallucinations can be limited w a feedback loop Show me another field that

1. Uses text in a “machine-like” form like coding does (very simple “grammar”)

2. Can have rapid loops to eliminate hallucination

I can think of one coming close: customer support offering a vetted list of text resources as a response. What else?
Mar 31 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
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.” Turned out that the only interns that other company could hire were ones that were either local (no housing!) or with parents who paid “the difference.”

Uber paid a new grad salary + housing. It was €3,700/month + €1,000/month housing.

That dev is still at Uber, now a sr eng.
Mar 28 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The more I'm using AI coding assistants, the more I feel that:

1. These tools will struggle to "replace" how we do coding today. They can augment it and make it more efficient (they already do).

2. Could there be "AI-first architectures" that are better fitted for these? I see is that these AI coding tools are great at generating scaffolds and v1.

The BIG struggle and problem comes with refactor / small (and tricky) modifications, DB scheme changes (that hit prod) etc.

Stuff that is hard enough even as a sr dev! And no "simple" answers.
Mar 27 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Anyone believing Apple would consider pulling out from the EU is in a bubble. Apple bends backwards to authoritarian policies in China (censorship etc) to stay there.

Also, Europe is 25% of Apple revenue.

If Apple doesn't like the rules, they can pull out, sure. Go ahead. Image Source:

The world's smallest violin playing its heart out for the world's second-most valuable company that prints profits ($96B in 2023!), acts as an overlord to developers and thinks regulation should not apply to them.

And love to taunt regulators.daringfireball.net/2024/03/eu_sha…
Mar 23 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Every time I have to explain to someone how “the EU” might sound similar to “the US” but it is so much more fragmented.

27 countries speaking 24 different languages, using 8 different currencies.

And this is why “an EU startup” has an inherent disadvantage vs “a US startup.” “Why are there no successful EU companies on the global scale? It’s because of how the EU regulates its companies, right?”

Not the main reason.

It’s because of fragmentation + market size. Take food delivery.

DoorDash operates in a single country; US. They still are worth more than all EU competitors, combined! Market size!
Mar 22 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Ok, this is it. Went to Glassdoor and am removing every single past contribution (salary, review, rating) I made.

The point of Glassdoor was that they keep all this anonymous. The company doxxing people is not something I want to contribute to.
Image Done. Now I cannot be doxxed even if Glassdoor decides they want to do it. All this deletion should be permanent.

I considered deleting my account but:

1. No deletion option, only "deactivate"

2. Glassdoor forces you to log in to view data points if you ever want to Image
Mar 21 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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: Image Excerpt from here:

"Apple has told automakers that the next generation of Apple CarPlay will take over all of the screens, sensors, and gauges in a car, forcing users to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience if they want to use any of the features provided by CarPlay. Here too, Apple leverages its iPhone user base to exert more power over its trading partners, including American carmakers, in future innovation."justice.gov/opa/media/1344…
Mar 20 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Interesting to see how some financially beneficial decisions can poison publicly traded companies.

Add a dark patterns that converts REALLY well and increase revenue by a lot (though customers complain): it’s almost impossible to get rid of it. The revenue drop would be too big! But over years, the reputation of this company becomes “unethical.” It’s former power users but by it become chief anti-advocates of the products.

And although everyone at the company agrees that these patterns are “not ideal,” all attempts to reverse it are impossible now.
Mar 19 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I’m really interested how a bank managed to deploy code that didn’t have tests for “can a user withdraw money when they don’t have enough balance.”

Development teams at banks are usually conservative, process-heavy and slow-moving with changes exactly to avoid this.

Wow: Image Full article:

Of course students figured it out and told each other. I say “of course” because when we had a “free order glitch” at UberEats in India in 2018: it was also students ordering free food.

Recouping that money will be another challenge. bbc.com/news/world-685…
Image
Mar 12 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
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. I do think most of those startups are chasing the money and (AI) funding.

I do think progress is continuous, and we'll see far better tools we can use as developers: just as it has always improved before.

I also think developing is more fun with small teams than doing it alone.
Mar 8 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Europe gets a lot of flak for how they regulate more and more of tech (in Europe, of course). Regulation sets new rules, often ones that companies wouldn’t follow if not required.

AWS just dropped their atrocious egress fees, globally, because of an EU regulation: Image AWS was required to end this practice aimed to lock customers in more only in Europe (it’s what the regulator cares about). They could have kept egress in-place worldwide. It would just have been very hard to defend doing so - so they dropped it.

aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free…
Mar 6 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image “Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan.”

Most devs w an Apple dev account don’t dare say ANYTHING negative of Apple.

epicgames.com/site/en-US/new…
Feb 28 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
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. It acts basically as a filter to get to customer support.

Good job on the team for making hallucination not possible - because it seems to spit out the same responses however I ask it, and refuses to go “out of bounds.”

It replaces the “RTFM” step, which could be win, yes.
Feb 16 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Ok, after mulling on this:

As a sw eng, it is, frankly, terrifying to stare down the possibility of "superhuman devs" that are AI tools running on GPUs that do your job better.

I get that this is what investors and founders want.

I'm not that eager to rush to this future. To be clear: investors always wanted this. The field of AI research has been about creating ways to help/augment/potentially replace humans in certain tasks. It started a long time with e.g. expert systems, neural networks, now transformers...

It's (luckily?) a hard problem!
Feb 4 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
As those working in tech, we owe it to educate people around us on the massive fraud potential for AI.

You should absolutely be distrustful of:
- Video calls
- Phone calls
- Emails
- DMs on social media

Assume it could be a deepfake, even if it looks real. Given you cannot trust any *inbound* phone calls/video calls (numbers can be faked; domains can be faked w similar-looking names):

It means if you get instructed to move money *from an inbound message,* do not do it. Instead, contact the person yourself on a channel you trust.
Feb 2 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is what clever marketing looks like. Compare against a much more expensive alternative and showcase how much better you are.

But the trick is that these are very different products. Many companies pay Slack to not have to manage infra, worry about GDPR, CCPA, security etc. As comparison: using Telegram for a 500-person group or company is even cheaper than any of these options: it’s free.

And yet you don’t see companies using this for professional work. Because that information is more valuable and B2B software is about value, not utility.
Jan 31 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Prediction: a lot less engineers will consider moving to engineering manager positions the next few years.

Going from engineer to EM was almost a no-brainer until now. Not much downside, but a lot of career upside (and some compensation upside).

Now it's a lot more career risk. And the tech lead position will become far more common, and in-demand.

A senior engineer who can manage when needed; and acts as a "mini manager" in an org where there's one manager with 20-30 engineer reports (many tech leads)