Pragmatic engineer on call

Break down milestones, assign estimates to them. The goal of designing a system should be simplicity. Migrations are one of the most overlooked topics in software engineering, especially at high-growth startups and companies. Edge cases are a funny thing. Nov 9, 2023 · What came first, The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter, or The Software Engineer’s Guidebook? By some distance, the book did. In some regions, the 75th percentile total compensation is at or above $200K. You check out the main branch and start working on it, make a small change, and commit this as a diff – a very small pull request. And finally, a pragmatic middle ground. 5, and GPT-4. ” A good example was last week’s article on Thriving as a founding engineer. Senior Full Stack Engineer at ePilot. Oct 27, 2021 · An editor not only makes your writing more clear, but it's a fantastic way to learn on how you can improve it. Because of our business, all our issues can wait until the next morning to be fixed. 3. 09 April 2024. Publish. Writing The Pragmatic Engineer. It’s already grown to an impressive 5. But when you start, it feels like when moving to a new city. Oct 19, 2021 · An engineer – often the on-call engineer – confirms that an outage is happening. Word: Pragmatic Engineer's Resume Template. The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. That now, as a manager, you have more in common with your own manager than you do with your directs. See all. Remote (Germany). In every issue, I cover topics related to Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. I mostly cover insights about the software engineering industry for more experienced software engineers and engineering managers. That “less polish” is harder to notice: but the smaller team size means faster iteration and lower overall cost that are both harder to ignore. Nov 23, 2023 · Employees get a healthy base salary. Software product categories and code freezes. Elin Nilsson. 9. May 1, 2024 · This article was published on 14 March 2024 in The Pragmatic Engineer, for subscribers. With remote work, engineers spend more time on video calls, which utilizes laptop resources like CPU, memory, and more. I write The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter - the #1 newsletter for engineering managers and senior engineers on Substack. Small and medium-sized tech companies facing higher tax bills in 2023 and 2024 will hire fewer developers. "Before this newsletter, you literally could not pay for these kinds of insights. Discussing recruitment with an engineering manager on the Coffee with a Recruiter Podcast with José Marchena. . Paulo André - formerly VP of Engineering and HelloFresh alumni. In this article, they published the damning claim that the startup only generated $600K in revenue in 2021, all while burning about $10M/month in cash, and being close to running out of money. He recently released his latest book, Effective Remote Work and I could think of few better people to give quality practical advice on remote work, than James. Nov 14, 2023 · ChatGPT is just one of OpenAI's products – OpenAI also shipped things like DALL·E 3 (image generation), GPT-4 (an advanced model) and the OpenAI API (which developers and companies use to integrate AI into their businesses. Exceptions to this are holidays: spring break, summer break and winter break. One email per week, 5 links of programming, big data, architecture, development processes and databases. $310,000 in total compensation ($180,000 base salary + the rest in stock). See a shorter, and updated version of this test here: The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 Questions on Engineering Culture. 2M members. This page is a collection on software engineering industry trends that The Pragmatic Engineer reported on, well before mainstream media outlets picked up on these. 2. Based in Israel. Apr 23•. What accidentally taking down Amazon. This highlights a marked shift in how top companies are approaching developer productivity measurement. Transparency on an ongoing basis. In 2020, I finalized the name. Nov 21, 2023 · Originally published 21 Nov 2023. Especially relevant for those at Big Tech & startups. Dec 28, 2021 · 29. The median salary is at-or-above 6 figures (in USD) almost everywhere. Every week, record key work items you’ve worked on: key code changes, code reviews, design documents, discussions and planning, helping out others, postmortems and anything else that took time, and has impact. Successful companies, however, grow continuously. Many startups give equity to engineers, and some startups hand out handsome equity packages to early employees. But that would be missing the journey. I’m just as guilty of this behaviour, often just calling code that is not good as bad or sloppy. Insights, patterns and trends I observe and hear about within Big Tech and at high-growth startups. Dependency and Risk Management in a pragmatic way. Dec 21, 2023 · Dec 21, 2023. Most software engineers primarily focus on becoming great at writing code. Redundancies might happen for cash flow purposes to replace in-house developers with vendors, which brings us to the next likely impact: Firing of non-US software engineers employed Aug 2, 2022 · Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies. But it’s more nuanced. Subscribe to The Pragmatic Engineer to keep up to date of the tech industry changing. These are: Clarity from the start. Oct 26, 2021 · Consider becoming an engineering manager. In the fall of 2019, I pitched it to three publishers. May 1, 2024 · The Pragmatic Engineer publishes every Tuesday (long-form pieces) and most Thursdays (timely pieces) on most weeks, and very occasionally, on Wednesday (bonus pieces). That’s 5. Do this while balancing short and long-term priorities. These are areas that can predict a good engineering culture, but most job descriptions do not mention them. Oct 28, 2020 · You end up opening up to your manager far more than you expected you would. Aug 2, 2022 · Oncall is paid additionally, as $800-1,200/week, meaning about an additional $8,000-12,000 per year. Jul 26, 2022 · A team needs to cover for 128 hours per week to cover oncall outside business hours, with two rotations, primary and secondary. I'm sharing this piece in public more than a month later, as it provides important context and analysis for the AI dev tools space. Jan 16, 2024 · For example, Developer Engagement was shared as a metric by Intercom, Postman, and Peloton. Apr 19, 2023 · Critical thinking will only become more important as AI tools spread more. 2M non-existent customers. The ride-hailing service’s open-source, large-scale metrics engine called M3, is an impressive piece of software. Senior Frontend Developer at ePilot. Pragmatic Engineers is the insider newspaper for the tech industry. For many non digital-first organizations, this type of acceleration is a big win. 5 million registered users. The company made $1. May 11, 2023 · Datadog is a leading observability tooling provider which went public in 2019, with a current market cap of $28B. 25 days per week, or 71. One of Gergely’s most interesting articles is The Pragmatic Engineer Test, a modern update to the famous Joel Test (which is now over 20 years old). Prepare for this meeting, getting feedback from the EM and other, experiences project leads. Newsletter. An L5 engineer received PPUs valued at $2M, vesting over 4 years: so $500,000 per year. 2023 was the second full year of Jan 24, 2023 · 1. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. Laura Tacho - VP of engineering and engineering leadership coach. May 14, 2019 · Skills that add a significant boost to the impact of any developer. Jul 26, 2022 · A team needs to cover for 128 hours per week to cover oncall outside business hours, with two rotations, primary and secondary. Expect to get 100 or more issues in you inbox, every year. Capture this plan in a short, written document. Mar 8, 2021 · The total compensation packages in the US have been shockingly high from the perspective of EU software engineers: and many engineers from the EU have packed up and left, seeing the wide gap. 7. e. Surrounded by many people, having many things to do. At this time, Klarna’s internal Slack had 7,539 members, so some quick maths showed around 700 people would be let go. Oncall is not paid. Also: Bending Spoons’ startup acquisition model, hiring upticks at Meta, Netflix and Amazon, and more. Pragmatic handling of edge cases. This post is a summary of the approach and tools I've used to build an engineering team, where everyone is a leader by rotating project lead responsibilities within the team. I've talked with dozens of software developers about what they like and dislike about their workplace - team, and company - professionally. Feb 20, 2024 · For us, every bit of added compute or bandwidth directly impacts the ChatGPT user experience. Exclusive stories and analysis of what is happening. They follow an agreed process to declare this incident, which is often a mix of declaring it over chat, and sometimes opening a ticket in a system used to track incidents. For a full rewrite, you a do gradual rollout. Most people don’t think too much about this extra day in the calendar, but as software engineers, we absolutely should! But first, a few current cases of systems whose developers didn’t: In Sweden, card payments are down at a leading supermarket chain. com in 1997 taught Joshua Burgin; tech industry veteran and one of Amazon’s first 100 employees. The incident is being mitigated. Nov 15, 2015 · Senior Frontend Engineer at WellTheory. It's tempting to get straight to the point: how to remove tech debt, and how to keep it at bay. They rarely have the annual performance-based bonuses that are typical at larger companies. Apr 11, 2024 · I started The Pragmatic Engineer Job Board in October 2021. You might think that’s all there is to understand how a circuit breaker works, but the devil is in the details. docx. Apr 7, 2022 · On Tuesday, 29 March, The Information published the article Why Stripe’s ‘Fast’ horse is losing the one-click checkout race. Five scaling challenges. This engineering culture test is valuable for current employees and prospective applicants to assess companies, but it’s also a valuable tool for engineering Oct 8, 2019 · The summary of the classic book Clean Code starts like this: “Even bad code can function. May 25, 2023 · I got a message from a software engineer working at a company which laid off 30% of staff in December 2022. In this book, I share 30 pieces of advice to keep growing professionally. 229. 2. Martin Mao, former manager on the team, shares the story. This is what I call the seniority roller coaster. 67B revenue in 2022, circa $140M per month. If this is not the case, it leads to confusion and will likely cause conflict down the line. Mentoring engineering leaders at all levels. The engineer wrote: “My company is removing Glassdoor reviews because their rating has gotten so low. This is an essential step to become a great engineer within a reasonably sized team. The Pragmatic Engineer in 2021: This issue is a recap of how the newsletter grew this year all the way to the #1 Technology newsletter on Substack. The above jobs score at least 9/12 on The Pragmatic Engineer Test. In spring 2019 when I took parental leave, I began writing the first draft of the book which launched this week. Author of The Software Engineer's Guidebook. But "bad code" is a lazy expression. Big Tech and startups, from the inside. For reviews of earlier years, see The Pragmatic Engineer in 2021 and in 2022. We rewrote the app using Swift 2. And this makes perfect sense. Scrum, together with weeks-long sprints can help teams move to more frequent shipping, so long as this frequency is not above the sprint length. Formerly at Codeship, Cloudbees and well-known in Oct 30, 2019 · Reach out to engineers on the owning team: in-person, over chat/email or a call, and talk Describe your code changes clearly , following pull request best practices . Financial risk: Startups tend to pay a lower base salary than Big Tech. The simpler the system, the simpler it is to understand, the simpler it is to find issues with it and the simpler it is to implement it. Don't forget to replace with your own email address and data! Some people have forgotten this step and I end up getting interview invitations. In 2024, these are: Nov 10, 2022 · Originally published 10 Nov 2022. It launched two years ago, with an invite-only beta launch last year. There's a lot to talk about with scaling challenges from GPUs. This group – in which plenty of people knew each other already – came together to research a new way to measure developer productivity in 2022. Covid-19 lockdowns and the rise of remote working have played a role in boosting CDEs. Apr 23, 2024 · Bluesky is known as a Twitter-alternative. Highly relevant for software engineers and managers, useful for those working in tech. For L5 levels – which maps roughly to staff engineer at the likes of Google – the median is around $300,000/year. 5 days per quarter, per rotation. Sep 5, 2019 · 6. The holiday code freezes which many tech companies had in place over the recent holiday period, are now lifted. We focus on: #1: GPU RAM and KV Cache. A weekly column with advice, observations, and inspiration across the software engineering industry. Oct 19, 2021 · An incident is declared. "Not targeting on algorithm, language, tools or libraries, it focuses on “Software Engineering” as a system, i. Managing technical risks. The cut would mean 10% of staff being let go via either a follow-up email sent to all staff. Insights into the process of hiring for a big tech companies and advice on how to stand out with your software engineering resume. Feb 27, 2024 · Engineering teams where with full-stack engineers, using cross-platform frameworks get the same stuff done with fewer people, with slightly less polish. Oct 12, 2021 · Other questions you can ask include ones on The Pragmatic Engineer Test. A new world to explore. Aug 31, 2021 · Switching for higher compensation can result in a “lower” title, like going from Senior Software Engineer to SWE 2 or VP Engineering to Senior Engineering Manager. Writing The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. Apr 2, 2024 · Before we start: I’ve published details on how indicate interest in writing a guest article The Pragmatic Engineer. The post goes through the most-read issues, some highlights and the numbers and ends with plans for 2022 and an ask for your feedback on the newsletter. May 9, 2023 · This is the case for a couple of well-known companies: Amazon: the median compensation package is $34,195. Software Engineering at Google by Titus Winters & others. Mar 29, 2020 · Blissful unawareness, denial, then acceptance, then resistance. Ross McNairn. 674K+ subscribers. If the call succeeds, the circuit breaker transitions to the closed state; if the call fails instead, it transitions back to the open state. On an earnings call a week ago, on 4 May, the CFO mentioned a “large upfront bill that did not recur,” saying: Aug 6, 2022 · This article, written in August 2022, when the job market for new grads was already very tough, is advice I have for new grads. Jan 12, 2022 · The Pragmatic Engineer Test. 👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. The more clear language it is described in, the more accessible that design is. An example is a Dutch engineer I know leaving their €80,000/year ($94,000) job in the Netherlands for an initially $350,000/year position at Lyft. You then continue working, creating a second diff, and a third, and so on. The speedrun for a complete culture overhaul at Twitter continues, and may conclude just two weeks after Elon Musk bought the company. DORA, SPACE and the need for a new approach. Remote (Global). The shutdown was triggered by my vendor – Pallet – discontinuing their job board and talent collective approach. Gergely Orosz. Especially when working across timezones, you might not be able to verify your fix: a clear description will help in this case. Apr 9, 2024 · I started The Pragmatic Engineer Job Board in October 2021. Originally published 20 Jul 2023. Julia Evans calls this a brag document and offers practical advice on The Pragmatic Engineer: Early Trends. Especially relevant for Jan 4, 2022 · Anton Drukh - formerly VP of Engineering, mentor to several tech executives. 279. Speeding up shipping to once every few weeks, from a cadence less frequent than this. Keeping a “work log” is a great idea for software engineers. Nov 23, 2023 · Gergely Orosz. Follow the RFC planning process. The #1 newsletter for engineering leaders and software engineers. Featured for 30 days. Aug 15, 2019 · Onboarding: a specific type of mentoring. During mitigation, the engineers involved provide updates. It suggests being an engineering executive in India can be very profitable. They explain how systems, processes, and unwritten rules work. In only 5 years, Hopin went from zero to a $7. com. If an engineer asks a question about strategy or tactics, both the engineering manager and the product manager should have the same answer. Well-oiled teams have a leadership that speaks with one voice. 5 days oncall. On the other hand, handling all possible edge cases in a new product or feature can take a lot of time. Relevant for software engineers and maangers, interesting for those working at tech. Code freezes at other companies: Spotify, X/Twitter, N26, Auth0, Podia. When encountered with jargon, you assume the other person must know better. Not: “AI is changing the world, says famous musician”. 500,000 tech professionals and growing. Pragmatic, simpler architecture. The Tech Resume Inside Out. * needless to say, your mileage might vary. This person helps understand the new environment, and often pairs to write code that ships to production for the first time. My goal is to work with hands-on engineering professionals to occasionally bring details, learnings and approaches from "working in the weeds. But while books and blog posts untangle what they mean by bad code, us, engineers, we rarely do. Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. Sep 28, 2023 · Startups: the bad. This is the typical journey engineers go through in their relationship with tech debt. As acquisition talks were ongoing, JP Morgan wanted to validate that Frank had the nearly 5M customers it claimed. The seniority roller coaster. Dec 21, 2023 · New resources and templates for engineers and managers added this year. Subscribe to The Pragmatic Engineer to stay up-to-date on what is happening with software engineering, Big Tech, and startups. He’s been working remote for 4 years, leading engineering teams of varying sizes throughout. Interestingly for software engineers, Bluesky is also a fascinating engineering project unlike any other mainstream social network. Sep 17, 2019 · Simple, jargonless software design over architecture patterns. Usually done on one or more planning meeting, with the engineering team. However, total compensation for senior software engineers is typically over $300,000/year in areas like the Bay Area or New York. 207. These typically run from sometime in December each year, until the following January. This generally means using standard, ‘boring’ technologies you're familiar and proficient with, instead of shiny, unproven technologies. In reality, Frank had 293,000 customers, so the CEO asked an engineer to fake the data and turn this list into 4. But: “Facebook is laying off staff, here is the criteria they are using to decide who”. The newsletter’s evolution in 2023 Sep 28, 2022 · In the half-open state, the next call is allowed to pass through to the downstream service. Oct 17, 2023 · The idea behind stacked diffs is that you can keep working on your main branch, and worry about reviews later. I would not recommend an editor for every blog post: but hire one if you're serious about wanting to write better. On Twitter - I tweet about featured listings. It includes sharing of the project management expectations Google Docs guide that my team uses. Mar 15, 2022 · This article is an excerpt from Migrations Done Well: a guide for executing migrations well, at both small and large scales, published in The Pragmatic Engineer. Remote work. It feels odd. Pressing the button to make my writing live is one I like to delay. Jun 2, 2022 · At 10am EST / 4pm in Sweden, Klarna’s CEO announced the news of the layoff in a pre-recorded video call. On this blog - with around 100,000 monthly visitors, many of them engineering leaders . Jan 13, 2020 · Lead a kickoff meeting with an agenda and all stakeholders present. PPUs entitle their holders to a percentage of profits generated by OpenAI. However, Uber has a problem that starts with Swift and ends with Apple. Launch offer: Featured listing: 40% off I then moved to be an engineering manager, having helped tens of developers on my team grow, get promoted and get better in various areas. You can see what I'm up to on my now page and here are details how to connect with me. Apr 11, 2024 · The Pulse #89: The end of Hopin. Sep 26, 2023 · At companies with large codebases, CDEs are a pragmatic way to increase the productivity of software engineers. I've been a mobile engineer myself, growing to the principal level, and later managed teams of mobile engineers. | The #1 technology newsletter on Substack for engineering leaders and software engineers. Jan 4, 2024 · Less hiring of software engineers in the US/more layoffs. Stitch Fix: the median compensation package is $39,000. Here they are: Do planning before building something new. Many well-funded startups which pay closer to the top of the market also make oncall as part of expectations as well. Without critical thinking, you let others do a lot of the thinking for you, and fail to spot problems with arguments. Companies including Atlassian, Lattice, and Spotify similarly rely on self-reported measures. Aug 7, 2018 · In this post, I'm summarizing the most important principles that I have seen make or break a project*. Click to read The Pragmatic Engineer, by Gergely Orosz, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Oct 3, 2018 · A word of warning, one of the steps will sound a little crazy. I've been a hiring manager for over 5 years, seeing hundreds of software engineer and engineering manager resumes. Mar 12, 2024 · The “10x engineer:" 50 years ago and now. 4. Shared leadership. On The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter - one of the most popular engineering leadership publications with over 18,000 subscribers. Software engineering resume tips on Level Up Engineering management podcast with Karolina Toth. Köln (Germany) or Remote (Germany). 5 years later, I am shutting it down permanently, despite a reasonable success in traction. and. Sep 21, 2021 · 3. This can be in-person whiteboarding or just talking it through with the team members, as long as you're all clear on how you will get things done. €70-100K. Ryn Daniels is a site reliability engineer whose work focuses on infrastructure operability, sustainable on-call practices, and the design of effective and empathetic engineering cultures. #2: Batch size, ops:bytes, and arithmetic intensity. If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox, you can subscribe here. dev where we are building the new standard for mobile development. Milestones that are directional. However, I might have eventually come to the May 17, 2023 · Abi started to work with Michaela on developer productivity in 2021. A common type of mentoring is having an onboarding buddy when joining a new company. In Part 1 we covered: Big Tech and code freeze approaches: Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, Uber. Download the resume template in two formats: Google Doc: Pragmatic Engineer's Resume Template - make your copy and edit. Share. Jul 20, 2023 · The above jobs score at least 9/12 on The Pragmatic Engineer Test. “Getting things done without much guidance” means different things at different types of companies: At a digital agency where the ‘what’ is pretty well defined by the client. An overview of the hardware the company uses inside its private cloud, a summary of their cloud strategy, and whether or not to onboard to the cloud. ”. It’s a late-stage startup valued at around $3B which had around 1,000 employees before the layoffs. Read it for free here. Featured in 4 issues. On one extreme, engineers often forget about many of these, having to come back to addressing them, after getting feedback from people testing the product or end users. Here's how this template looks like: A reading club for software developers, curated by Suraj Kapoor, fullstack engineer, product person and former VC. Dec 17, 2021 · A pragmatic overview of automated testing approaches. Programming Digest, curated by Jakub Chodounsky, CTO at Hatch. ) ChatGPT and the API each expose several classes of models named GPT-3, GPT-3. Gergely Orosz Last updated 20 July 2023. 74. To get deep dives in your inbox like this issue, sign up here. Save for India and Africa, median base salaries for senior+ roles are at or above $100,000. 7B valuation, and back to zero again. There is more demand and openings for engineering management in the industry than for staff and above engineers. They live in Berlin with a perfectly reasonable number of cats and currently work at HashiCorp on the Terraform Cloud team. $130-150K + equity. In this second part of a three-part series, we continue our deep dive into code freezes. Read more of these trends here, such as the State of the tech market in 2023 or an RTO wave in late 2022. May 17, 2021 · When you have an app that generates close to $1B/month in revenue, you tread really carefully. Similarly, when coming across a "thought leader," you assume they must be right. Based in Germany (Berlin). Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sep 12, 2023 · Uber built an in-house observability platform called M3 to cope with huge quantities of data, as the business grew with breackneck speed. Jun 22, 2021 · We don’t have on-call rotation, nor alerts at 2 AM. It's a good read and the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Previously at Uber, Microsoft, Skype, Skyscanner. 👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. Get the book here. I'm also an advisor at mobile. The Pragmatic Engineer | 53,198 followers on LinkedIn. 1. The DORA and SPACE frameworks. A deep dive into novel design…. Be pragmatic. Full archive of all the posts from The Pragmatic Engineer. Engineering director Alex Reece shares two more questions he's successfully used to reverse interview companies: 1. Feb 29, 2024 · It’s 29th February, a once-every-four-year occurrence. One of these is writing. I'm starting to see an interesting trend in the Mar 26, 2024 · This constraint affects all aspects of a founding engineer’s work: Technologies used. Because of our business, all our issues can wait until Jul 4, 2023 · In my observation, a senior engineer is basically someone who gets things done without much guidance. Make small changes, A/B test them and improve slowly over time. The shutdown was triggered by my vendor – Pallet – discontinuing their job board and talent ». Nov 9, 2023 · In 2021, an engineer was asked to produce fake data for 4. At big tech, the engineering manager to engineer ratio tends to be 1:5-12, while the staff engineer to engineer ratio is more typically around 1:20-50. Dec 5, 2023 · This issue is the final part of a three-part series on the topic of code freezes, resuming almost a year after the last installment. Aug 9, 2022 · James is the Director of Engineering at Shopify, a fully remote company. 86 1 Nov 2022. Jun 13, 2023 · Originally published 13 Jun 2023. If you have a question on career growth, professional growth or other topics that someone like myself can answer, send an email to askTheEM@pragmaticengineer. , stuff that is not taught at any school. Previously at Uber, Skype, Microsoft. The more context you provide, the better. Apr 13, 2020 · A Software Engineering Culture Test. This article was originally published in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. Enjoying this article? Subscribe to my newsletter to get issues like this in your inbox. Dec 14, 2021 · 3. 10-15 links with a concise tl;dr; for each article. An engineer – often the on-call engineer – confirms that an outage is happening. About. Nov 24, 2019 · Attrition has been low, and people seem to like being on the team. Tech industry pulse in 2023. No engineer is allowed to spend more than two weeks oncall in a quarter, and two weeks spent oncall mean 10. Collect, curate, and publish testimonials and social shoutouts with ease. fd ff xf xw jm zv fa mx gm ls