Two months after the startup went bankrupt, administrators have summarized the $80M+ debt the company has accumulated, most of which will not be paid. The highest offer to buy Pollen’s business assets - but without its liabilities - currently stands at only $250K. Details. | Continue reading
The past decade, one of the best ways to maximize compensation outcomes was to join a pre-IPO company issuing generous equity, then wait for the IPO. This strategy seems to be less profitable in 2022. | Continue reading
Will Meta do layoffs? This is the question on everyone’s mind who I talked with at Meta. I outline possible options and give my opinion on the likelihood of layoffs in the coming months. | Continue reading
The company’s growth is under more pressure than it has ever been, and in a worse strategic position than Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Why is this and what can the company do to get out of this situation? | Continue reading
Two chapters from the book Understanding Distributed Systems by Roberto Vitillo | Continue reading
Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies. | Continue reading
We could well be seeing one of the most difficult times to break into software engineering. Here is my advice to maximise chances of getting that first software engineering job. | Continue reading
When I decided to write and sell my first ebook, The Tech Resume Inside Out, 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, learned plenty on … | Continue reading
I'm a full-time creator. With remote work becoming more common in tech, I get more messages from people asking: how can they do what I do? | Continue reading
What companies follow an RFC-like process, and what are templates and examples to get inspiration from? | Continue reading
Approaches for shipping code to production reliably, every time. | Continue reading
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? | Continue reading
I don't know of many career hacks that get you ahead over consistently putting in the work. However, there is one approach I wish I had done earlier, and now recommend to anyone who receives an offer from any tech company. It's also the best career hack I know: Reverse | Continue reading
Watch this article as a short video on my YouTube channel. This article is thoughts from the Performance Reviews chapter of The Software Engineer's Guidebook I'm writing - subscribe to get notified when the book is published. I've done dozens of performance reviews while I was an … | Continue reading
Amazon has a large number of internal systems. Here are ones worth knowing about as a software engineer and engineering manager. | Continue reading
What impact will the war have on the European tech scene, on international companies and will we see "tech migrations" from Ukraine and Russia? | Continue reading
A deep dive with five Technical Program Managers (TPM) on what the role is, how it evolved, and how engineers and EMs benefit working with TPMs. | Continue reading
Writing is an increasingly important skill for engineering leaders. Indeed, poor writing can hamper career progression, above a certain level. Tactics for more clear, more frequent and more confident writing. I’ve observed that my writing is not up to par with my peers. How can I … | Continue reading
Books perfect as reading or gifts during the end-of-year break for those working in tech. 95 book recommendations. I’ve always found books are an underrated way to learn something new. Great books contain years of hard-earned experiences compressed into what you can read in hours … | Continue reading
Stories from six engineering leaders who succeeded in building and growing diverse teams. Hiring approaches, retention tactics and strategies. | Continue reading
One reason incidents are important is that they often reveal the real state of products, teams or organizations, which is often very different from the imaginary picture that engineering leaders have in their heads. Transparent incident reports and a good incident-handling strate … | Continue reading
Since leaving Uber a year ago, in October 2020, I've been making a living from writing - one with comparable income to when I was employed: Crossed 1,000 paying subscribers this week. Six weeks after starting a paid newsletter I'm now making a living writing about software | Continue reading
12 questions to get a sense of what a tech company is like at to work at, based on things most job postings do not talk about. Based on ideas explored in A Software Engineering Culture Test. A higher score reflects companies that have more engineering-friendly and predictable cul … | Continue reading
The Cheetah is a software engineer who is first and foremost very curious and blazing fast. The two are connected. They approach everything with an "interesting, let me look into it" type of mindset. And as learning and understanding is second nature, they take in new information … | Continue reading
The tech job market is on fire, across the globe, for people with a few years of industry experience under their belt. This is especially true for software engineers, but other tech functions are also following. I talked with dozens of hiring managers - from engineering managers … | Continue reading
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? | Continue reading
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 Enginee … | Continue reading
An engineering manager shares how hiring can be complicated behind the scenes. He says: "I'm leading a team that was on auto-pilot mode for some time. I recently made a decision to hire a great candidate that the team was not sure about. I found that the team's objections were | Continue reading
I'd been an engineering manager at Uber for a year on a team of 10 when my manager pulled me aside to talk about team structure. "What do you think about a reorg, where instead of the current full-stack teams, we have a mobile team with 20 engineers and backend | Continue reading
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. I | Continue reading
Let me pitch a business model to you: Cameo, but for tech professionals, and where the "providers" work completely for free. I know, I know, you're saying I'm crazy. But just hang in with me. Mentoring is something that most people in tech would greatly benefit from. So how about | Continue reading
I released my first paperback book, Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39 Engineering Challenges, a month and a half ago, which book is free until 31st May as a PDF. I wrote this book with an unusual distribution model. I reached out to sponsors - vendors I mentioned in the | Continue reading
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. PrologueIt's the mid … | Continue reading
Watch this article as a short video on my YouTube channel. Are you a manager? Read my advice on how managers can write fair performance reviews for their directs. Performance reviews are coming up. I've always found this period nerve wracking, despite having gone through it so ma … | Continue reading
As apps become large, it often makes sense to build parts of the application as reusable components or modules. For large companies, either with several apps or several mobile teams, reusing the code owned by another team becomes a no-brainer. For example, a mobile platform team … | Continue reading
A reader asks a question that comes up at some point in every engineer's and engineering manager's career, where their manager, or the one above will pop the question. Can you measure engineering productivity? And if so, how can we measure it right now? They ask: I work as an | Continue reading
I've been a hiring manager at Uber, in Amsterdam, for over 4 years. The market - and compensation - for software engineers have moved upwards at an incredible pace over during this time. Interesting enough, many engineers did not notice any meaningful salary changes these years. … | Continue reading
This post is an excerpt Building Mobile Apps at Scale book I'm writing. The book is free - get it here. As the number of mobile engineers working on an app - or in the company - grows, the trend of “reinventing the wheel” tends to emerge as one of | Continue reading
I've come across the book System Design Interview: an Insider's Guide by accident (paperback book, and online course - both at $25). I was looking for good book resources after several people have been asking me how they can get better at building distributed systems or learning … | Continue reading
I've been noticing that while there's a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there's a lot less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale. Building a backend system that serves millions of parallel customers means building highly … | Continue reading
A senior engineer who is on track to becoming an engineering manager for their current team asked me what it's really like when you become the engineering manager. When you get the title change, and you turn up the next day as the manager of the team. What does it | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
After more than four years, I've decided to leave Uber. It's been a crazy, incredible, at times stressful, humbling, and ridiculously fun time. I've learned more here than I could have at any other place and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything. In 2016 it was "full stea … | Continue reading
As I look back to over a decade ago, there are a few things I wish I'd started doing sooner. Habits that could have helped made me grow faster and in a more focused way. This is the advice I'd give my younger self, who has just landed their first | Continue reading
Do you actually use algorithms and data structures on your day to day job? I've noticed a growing trend of people assuming algorithms are pointless questions that are asked by tech companies purely as an arbitrary measure. I hear more people complain about how all of this is a pu … | Continue reading
You've hit a problem you can't solve by yourself. You're stuck and have been for a while now. You could do with help. Before you turn to the next person to ask for help, let's hit the pause and think about the implications for a bit. Everyone on the team | Continue reading
I've talked with dozens of software developers about what they like and dislike about their workplace - team, and company - professionally. I'm starting to see an interesting trend in the environments that make people happy and thriving - and have them stay longer - versus ones w … | Continue reading