The Pragmatic Engineer AMA

**Gergely Orosz** (0:00)
Today's episode is a different one. It's an AMA where I answer questions that you submitted. Asking new questions is Giggs, that is Volodymyr Giginiak, C2 at Wordsmith. Wordsmith is a legal AI startup where I'm an investor and know the team well, and Giggs was just in town to help out with this AMA. We've grouped the questions as Observations across the industry Opinions on AI Opinions on hiring Questions about myself Advice on specific situations And the Pragmatic Engineer as a business. Thanks to Antisysys for being our presenting sponsor. With Antisysys, you can verify your system's correctness without human review or traditional interrogation tests and avoid bugs or outages. With this, let's jump in.

**Volodymyr Giginiak** (0:34)
Hey, Ghergay. Welcome to this reverse podcast AMA.

**Gergely Orosz** (0:38)
It's really nice to be a guest on my own podcast.
This is really cool and thanks for coming here. For some background, we know each other from Wordsmith, which is one of the very few startups I still investing because I stopped investing, but about two years ago, I invested with a friend, Ross, who I worked together. It's really nice to have you here.

**Volodymyr Giginiak** (0:58)
Yeah, and I very appreciate you putting trust in us, investing, and let's get started. So first question, what made you switch from a full IC role like at Uber to focus on sharing, reporting tech content?

**Gergely Orosz** (1:11)
Yeah, so at Uber, I started as an IC and I was an IC for about 10 years before Uber. I started as a senior engineer, I became a manager pretty quickly. It wasn't an IC role, but I guess a manager role, but it doesn't change the story too much. I was hitting about four years at Uber and two things happened at the same time. One is Uber in 2020 had layoffs because COVID hit Uber's business really bad. I had access to our internal dashboard to where we saw the revenue for rides and it was just going down very close to zero.
I was actually sharing it to my team because I figured transparency is a good thing. I'm not sure that was the smartest thing, but I'd probably still do it again. I was showing people like, this is not looking good. And we were all collectively freaking out a little bit. And layoffs came very predictably. It was a 20% layoffs. About a quarter of my team was unfortunately gone. And the remainder of my team, our mission no longer made sense in this new world where we were building some something for drivers when we thought there would not be as many drivers and we would have to compete with them. But because of COVID, drivers actually were flocking to the platform. And so I got a new team to work with, and it felt to me for the first time in four years that they were going really well. And I just felt demotivated. I knew that the business would be doing poorly.
And I also asked myself like why, what I wanted to do after Uber. And before right before I joined Uber, I got this offer, which was an amazing compensation package, which a bunch of stock. And I told myself, well, stock, I mean, who knows if we were will go public or not. But I said, if Uber does go public and this this money turns into stock, I had about, I got about $500,000 worth of stock as a grant option. I'm like, if I have like 500k in my bank account, well, I can take a risk and for the next thing, I can actually do a startup. So I remembered this at Uber had gone public and that 500k stock turned into 400k because of the stock price was a bit lower. And then you have to pay taxes on it. So it was less. But I still had a lump sum sitting in my savings account. And I was like, I don't have to work actually for like, I could not work for like two or three years easily. I was like, well, maybe I should take a risk. And my plan was leave Uber, finish writing the Software Engineers Guidebook, which is something I started writing at Uber, just finish it in six months. And afterwards, do what you've done, which is start a startup, join a startup. Because I was a little bit tired of being a middle manager. They tell you, you're a manager. You know, congratulations, you became a manager. They should have said you became a middle manager. Because now your job is to keep your team happy and to keep management happy. Especially I was in a different region. I was in Europe. So this was easy. But when layoffs came, it was a lot of politics, a lot of explaining regulations that it wasn't what I wanted to do. Also keep your peers happy in terms of your manager peers. It was pretty tiring. And I was like, I want to be in charge next time because I have a lot of ideas, but I felt I was like fighting the machine, if you will, in some sense. But that was my plan. It involved nothing with writing except just finish this book. I have a legacy, I can give this book to people, I can be proud of it.