Observations across the software engineering industry.
Visit blog.pragmaticengineer.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2017 – Jun 2026
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In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
I've worked at various tech companies: from "traditional" shops and consultancies, through an investment bank, to high-growth tech firms. I've also talked with software engineers working at startups, banking, automotive, big tech, and more "traditional" companies. This mix had a healthy sample of Silicon-Valley…
Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They're someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide
How does mentoring work? I asked this question ten years into my software engineering career when I joined Uber. Until then, I've never received or done mentoring, or at least never put this label on any activity I've done before. Uber, however, had an official mentoring program. Almost
Of the biggest tech companies, only Apple has not executed major job cuts. But why is this, and can we now expect it to follow suit by shedding workers?
The FinTech company valued at $45B laid off 10% of its staff. How did it happen, and what can other companies learn from its execution?
A survey of how tech projects run across the industry highlights Scrum being absent from Big Tech. Why is this, and are there takeaways others should take note of?
This article is part of a 3-part series on trimodal compensation: * Part 1: The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021, this article) * Part 2: The trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited (2024, this article) * Part 3: The trimodal nature of tech compensation in
When I decided to write and sell my first ebook, The Tech Resume Inside Out [https://thetechresume.com/], I expected to learn about the writing process. How to create a high-quality publication. How to work with editors. Designing a cover and illustrations for the book. And I have, indeed,
I've worked on many projects throughout my career as a software engineer. However, Helix - Uber's Rider app rewrite in 2016 introducing Swift and RIBs - stands as the craziest project by a margin. This is my story and some of my journal entries from the time. Prologue It's
There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.
Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies.
A couple of months ago I moved from a senior engineer position to being an engineering manager on a medium sized team. I've found this role change come with a steep learning curve: many things that mattered when I was an individual contributor - like writing good code and teaching
tl;dr Nonprofit/pro bono organizations I suggest for offering mentoring/seeking mentorship: Mentoring Club [https://www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/category/software-engineering] (experienced mentors, EU focus), Coding Coach [https://codingcoach.io/] (aimed at software engineers), Mentors in Tech…
In tech, switching jobs almost always comes with either a financial or a title upside. However, it doesn’t always come with both. 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. This
Having worked for a decade as an engineer at various companies, I noticed how most teams in software often have "the" manager and "the" tech lead or "the" senior engineer. These are the decision-makers and ones that lead all projects. Many engineers go to these people asking, "What do
The internet has been speculating the past few days on which crypto company spent $65M on Datadog in 2022. I confirmed it was Coinbase, and here are the details of what happened.
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
Note: if you're just looking for performance review templates and examples, head to the templates page [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/templates-as-inspiration-for-software-engineers/] to download them. I've had about a dozen performance reviews during my decade-long software engineering career. Some of them were…
The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead.
The maker of WordPress took 2M customers from its biggest rival: has a red line been crossed?
The year was 2007. I was a college student attending a 24-hour hackathon where we had had to build something on top of live trucking data. We were given an API that sent GPS and other metadata for 100 trucks roaming across Europe, the data updating every five seconds.
See a shorter, and updated version of this test here: The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 Questions on Engineering Culture [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/pragmatic-engineer-test/]. I've talked with dozens of software developers about what they like and dislike about their workplace - team, and company …
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups