/Gergely Orosz

A Senior Engineer / EM Job Search Story tl;dr: The job search experience of Davidson Fellipe, a lead software engineer with over 15 years of experience. The article highlights the challenges and strategies of job searching in the current market, with insights into interview processes and time management. Fellipe embarked on a three-month search, focusing on engineering manager roles. He utilized tools like spreadsheets, Teal application tracker, Simplify, and Notion to stay organized. Fellipe also emphasized the importance of referrals and crafting tailored resumes. He eventually received one engineering manager offer and two individual contributor offers, accepting a senior engineer position.

featured in #439


What Is A Senior Software Engineer At Wise And Amazon? tl;dr: Gergely delves into senior software engineer roles at Wise and Amazon. At Wise, senior engineers lead significant projects, contribute to feature planning, and require good communication and problem-solving skills. At Amazon, the equivalent role deals with ambiguity, leads projects, communicates technical ideas efficiently, and ensures that the team's success doesn't solely rely on them. While definitions of 'senior' vary across the two companies, clear expectations across companies include project leadership, problem-solving skills, and effective communication.

featured in #436


Interesting Learnings From Outages tl;dr: The article discusses the importance of investigating and learning from outages in the industry. It explores the different types of postmortems, including internal, customer-only, and public postmortems. The article dives into 3 case studies: (1) Adevinta experienced a significant impact due to a DNS outage, (2) GitHub experienced an outage due to a network configuration issue at their secondary site, (3) Reddit experienced an issue with a Kubernetes cluster upgrade gone wrong."

featured in #432


An Explosion In Software Engineers Using AI Coding Tools? tl;dr: What do AI coding tools help the most with? The survey lists the top areas mentioned by developers: (1) Learn: develop coding language skills (57%). (2) Productivity: become more productive (53%). (3) Focus: spend more time building and creating, less on repetitive tasks (51%). Gergely dives how engineers are leveraging AI tools.

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Should You Optimize For All-Cash Compensation, If Possible? tl;dr: “Although still rare in the industry, companies like Netflix and Shopify let employees choose how much of their total compensation is stock. What are the approaches to take?”

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An Educational Side Project tl;dr: “What does a great side project look like, which helps learn new technologies, but also helps stand out when looking for a new job?” Gergely analyses an Uber simulation app built from scratch in this context.

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A New Way To Measure Developer Productivity – From The Creators Of DORA And SPACE tl;dr: The new framework is a “developer-centric approach to developer productivity” illustrating that DevEx is comprised of 3 pillars - flow state, feedback loops and cognitive load. Gergely interviews the team behind this framework presenting their approach and implementation.

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Compensation At Publicly Traded Tech Companies tl;dr: "Over the past few weeks, the majority of US publicly traded companies have published their median total compensation numbers for 2022." Gergely has collected data on 100 tech companies and analyses the results. 

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Uber’s Engineering Level Changes tl;dr: “Uber addressed this inconsistency in levels by updating engineering levels to be more in-line with the rest of the industry. The company pretty much renamed senior 2 engineer as staff engineer, and updated the titles from L6. They also added a new level 9.”

featured in #409


Is Critical Thinking The Most Important Skill For Software Engineers? tl;dr: “If someone cannot explain a concept without jargon, I now doubt they truly understand what they are talking about. The true test of properly understanding a given topic is whether you can teach it to someone else. Explaining your thoughts without the use of jargon - or gradually introducing jargon - is a form of teaching, as you need to adopt to someone who has less domain knowledge.” Gergely provides us with 4 tips on how to improve our critical thinking skills.

featured in #408