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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2h

and yet, native mobile engineering was not all that understood by leadership

also, Uber had (and has) 5x or more backend engineers than mobile engineers.

I wrote the book www.mobileatscale.com based on all the stuff I had to explain to eng directors at Uber about how mobile is different...

Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39 Engineering Challenges

The guide for building large, iOS and Android native apps - with the challenges and common solutions across the industry.

www.mobileatscale.com

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5h

My frustration btw was not with how the promo didn’t happen.

It’s that there was no feedback on what was the gap in professional skills or experience needed

The feedback was professionally incomprehensible and so not actionable

And my management chain + HR didn’t see this as a problem but I did

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5h

… got promoted with a slam dunk the next cycle (the committees feedback was they didn’t understand why he was rejected the last cycle).

A few years later Apple recruited him and he ended up owning one of the big apps almost everyone on an iPhone uses daily

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5h

Anyway it was this awkward situation where I as a manager told the engineer the system is broken; I tried but couldn’t fix it; the committee feedback is BS and can be ignored and I’m just as frustrated as them except I didn’t miss out on a promo.

I’m the end, he stuck it out…

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5h

Yes - I basically told them the promo committee is unqualified, I went as high as I could to fix it, and they should have been promoted, and the feedback is garbage.

Then told them I can help them find new teams and understand / support also if they’d leave and will give them the best references

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5h

It was a TON of documentation! Which accidentally worked in my team’s favour: we were on a smaller site (Amsterdam) working with the US a lot so documented *everyting* especially that a lot of work was across time zones. Plus I always push to write things down

And still was tons of writing!

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5h

2. Scaffolding on mobile is more lines of code and more verbose than backend, and some of it was generated

It was so maddening

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5h

The feedback I recall was eg hung up on how their diffs were often large

… but didn’t understand that it was

1. all stacked diffs (all small!) that were large because CI on mobile took an hour to run and reviews. They basically expected backend workflow on a mobile, totally different codebase

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 6h

As I understood the intention was good: having a committee who doesn’t know you

Mobile engineers in my team were known by the experienced mobile engineers on the promo committees, so they were not assigned

But the backend / native mobile divide was (probably still is!) very big…

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 6h

The feedback was so out of touch and recommendations on professional growth made zero sense so I took it to HR to get at least a single native mobile eng take a look at the package

HR then said the process must be followed and next cycle they’ll fix it… got a taste of large company processes

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 6h

Thinking about the time when Uber made changes to the promotion process to make it unbiased.

So the 2 mobile engineers up for promo on my team were reviewed by a committee of all backend engineers

And rejected them w arguments that showed they don’t understand native mobile dev

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 21h

Covered it at the time! blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

And it's been reversed, mostly: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-se...

IME, this did not impact the tech jobs market nearly as much as interest rate changes.

The Pulse: Section 174 is reversed! Mostly, that is

Finally, relief: tax regulation hurting the US tech industry is striked off for good - for the most part, that is.

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 21h

And this is the a sympthom, not the root cause. (Also, talking with hiring managers and recruiters in tech: none of them told me they use AI tools for filtering. Inbounds are simply not being read often, because there are so much of them + low quality!)

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 21h

"It's the weirdest job market in my 15 years in tech" -- from a Big Tech recruiter. But why is the job market so weird?

Talking to 30+ hiring managers and recruiters, it doesn't seem like AI. It seems more like.. interest rates.

My longer analysis: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-t...

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 23h

Full episode:

• YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM0W...

• Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6aqk...

• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

• Summary and transcript: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/high-growt...

High growth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein

YouTube video by The Pragmatic Engineer

www.youtube.com

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 23h

What makes a standout software engineer?

Charles-Axel Dein was engineer #20 at Uber, hired me there and was my manager for years (a great manager, I might add.) He answers, and also shares what a standout engineer looks like at CloudKitchens, today:

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

And this engineer is one of those "invisible engineers" from the outside.

No social media footprint, GitHub pretty much empty the last 5 years

You cannot tell from the outside how insanely good of an engineer this person is - until you ask ex colleagues. Many such cases.

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

This is the power of "network" when "network" comes from doing standout work wherever you work, helping colleagues even when not asked.

It's also why the only sure way to hire someone like this is via a referral: with so many solid options, they won't bother with applications.

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

One of the best staff-level engineers I worked in the past with is on the market.

This is someone who will not fire off a single job application: already interviewing at companies where ex-colleagues heard he's on the market. Even if not hiring, they are creating space for him.

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

Also, the same recruiter said compensation expectations for these same folks who are totally out of the loop with AI are jaw-dropping.

I guess a tip to eng leaders interviewing: if the recruiter knows more about applied AI thank you do, don't be surprised on not hearing back...

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

From a recruiter at publicly traded tech company:

"Been hiring for eng leadership positions. Several engineering leaders I talk to claimed that they are building AI products at their current position. But when I drill down, all they know about AI is basically using ChatGPT...."

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

If they would have hired any external consultant, they would have gotten the advice to have the backup in a different location than the primary. Plus, to have offline backups.

A backup on AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle or any cloud would have avoided this…

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-10...

NIRS fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups available

A fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) Daejeon headquarters destroyed the government’s G-Drive cloud storage system, erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil se...

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

Didn’t think we’d see incompetence at this scale.

The backup of the on-prem data center for the Korean government was in the same location as the primary one.

Any basically qualified tech professional knows that this is no resilient backup: and now all data is lost…

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 3d

Code repeating itself in a codebase slowly becomes a form of tech debt-and it’s tricky to avoid on larger projects, even at Google.

I wonder when using AI coding tools, duplication would start to become a problem sooner vs before?

From Code Health Guardian by Artie Schevchenko

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 3d

Behind the scenes of lots of AI startups that announced raising a large round of funding:

Rushing to hire more enterprise salesfolk: B2B sales is the only way to grow fast enough to raise a next round

Not sure it’s been a better time to be in enterprise sales than now…

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