Wrapped: The Pragmatic Engineer in 2024
The year’s most-read articles, some personal favorites, and a look back at a busy year in tech
Hi – this is Gergely with a free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover software engineering at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. To get issues like this every week, subscribe:
This holiday season marks the end of the third year of The Pragmatic Engineer as my full-time focus, following more than a decade working as a software engineer and engineering manager. In 2024, a total of 103 newsletter issues have been read by subscribers, and this article is number 104. You received deep dives on Tuesdays, The Pulse on Thursdays, and since October, there’s podcast episodes every other Wednesday.
As of today, there’s an incredible 866,461 readers of this newsletter, which is higher than the population of San Francisco; more than 300,000 of whom arrived in the past year alone. Special thanks to paying subscribers, who get access to all deep dives, issues of The Pulse, resources for engineering managers and software engineers, and other perks. And thank you to every reader; I truly value your support.
Today, we cover:
Most popular articles. Five of the most-read, and five of my favorites.
Tech in 2024. AI is changing software engineering, but not as fast as some expected
Evolution of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter. The new podcast, more industry research than ever, and valid tracking the tech pulse in real time.
The Software Engineer’s Guidebook. Two translations, one audiobook, and more than 30,000 copies sold.
See the annual review from previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021.
1. Most popular articles
This year’s most-read articles, by numbers of views:
The end of 0% interest rates: what the new normal means for software engineers. The end of 10+ years of 0% interest rates has changed the tech industry, but what do higher rates mean for software engineering jobs, developers, and careers; and how to prepare for it?
State of the software engineering job market in 2024. A deep dive into job market trends, the places hiring the most software engineers, growth areas, and more. Exclusive data and charts.
Scaling ChatGPT: Five Real-World Engineering Challenges. Just one year after its launch, ChatGPT had more than 100M weekly users. In order to meet explosive demand, the team at OpenAI overcame several scaling challenges. An exclusive deep dive.
Surprise uptick in software engineering recruitment. June and July are usually the quietest months for tech recruitment, but this year saw a spike in interest from recruiters in software engineers and EMs at that time. We dug into an unexpected, welcome trend
Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network. Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 25 million users since publicly launching in February. A deep dive into novel design decisions, moving off AWS, and more.
My personal favorites:
The Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation Revisited. Why can a similar position offer 2-4x more compensation in the same market? A closer look at the trimodal model I published in 2021. More data and new observations.
Inside Stripe’s Engineering Culture. Stripe is one of the world’s largest online payment companies. A deep dive into its engineering culture of operational excellence, API review, internal tools, and more.
What is Old is New Again. The past 18 months have seen major change reshape the tech industry. What does this mean for businesses, dev teams, and what will pragmatic software engineering approaches look like, in the future?
Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples. A deep dive into developer productivity metrics used by Google, LinkedIn, Peloton, Amplitude, Intercom, Notion, Postman, and 10 other tech companies.
What is Reliability Engineering? A history of SRE practice and where it is today, plus advice on working with reliability engineers, as a software engineer. A guest post by SRE expert and former Googler, Dave O’Connor
While I did not break them out individually, engineering culture deepdives bring deeply interesting details from startups, scaleups and Big Tech. This year, we shared more details on Shopify, Antithesis, Anthropic, Oxide, Bluesky and Stripe.
This year featured several guest articles from industry experts. If you have interesting experiences or stories to share, here are details on how to express interest.
2. Tech in 2024
We tracked the tech industry’s pulse closely, all year; here are some standout trends:
Focus on efficiency due to higher interest rates. This year’s mega trend was the final demise of zero percent interest rates, after more than a decade. In a higher interest rate environment, companies cut back on spending, investors allocate less to venture capital, and it’s harder for tech companies to raise funding.
As a result, there’s less hiring, some tech companies downsize, and the job market’s tougher for software engineers. The good news is that we saw this before during the Dotcom Bust and the global financial crisis; in both cases, things got better over time. We analyzed this mega trend and its implications.
GenAI frenzy. ChatGPT launched two years ago in November 2022, and in 2024 it continued to take the tech industry, and society at large, by storm. The end of zero interest rates meant that VC investment in tech dropped, but that was counterbalanced by the magnetic appeal of LLMs and AI.
This year, OpenAI raised a record-breaking $6.6B in funding (an all-time record that was broken just this week by Databricks raising $10B.) In 2024, the single best way to raise VC funding was to be an AI startup. Predictably, non-AI tech startups looking for the next round of funding are increasingly pivoting to AI because not doing so makes this harder.
LLMs to change software engineering. Has there ever been such rapid adoption of a new technology, as with GenAI coding tools? In our mid-2024 survey, more than 75% of engineers shared that they use GenAI tools for work. ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot each had more mentions than all other AI coding tools combined.
But dev tooling seems to be changing rapidly. Cursor, Windsurf, and Zed, are all new IDEs that are gaining momentum; and Cursor might have surpassed GitHub Copilot usage, at least for now. There’s also coding AI agents that are becoming the next wave of innovation, with a race between startups to build the first “hit” AI coding agent, with Cognition AI’s Devin the current frontrunner.
In five years’ time, most software engineers will use IDEs and dev tools that will be packed with GenAI-powered functionality. The race is on as to which tool that will be; meaning more innovation and experimentation to come. It’s rare to see so many startups having a shot at unseating the incumbent, Microsoft, which has an unfair distribution and pricing advantage, and will seek to protect market share in this key segment.
GenAI is impacting hiring. LLMs are clearly changing software engineering hiring, both in how hiring processes work, and in that junior engineering positions are harder to find. GenAI tools are frequently likened in effectiveness to an intern or junior engineer. With higher interest rates, less recruitment, and more senior engineers available for hire than before; most companies will likely opt to hire senior engineers who produce more with these GenAI tools.
I predict entry-level hiring will increase, but entry-level engineers will be expected to use GenAI coding tools, and get to the senior level faster than before. We analyzed more in How GenAI is reshaping tech hiring.
Some fundamentals will not change. GenAI has a speedy pace we’ve not seen in tech for decades. However, it’s not the first drastic change; industry legend Grady Booch recalled how in the 1970 and 80s, the shift from mainstream computers to distributed computing was similarly fundamental, with many “old school” mainframe programmers struggling to adapt. In our conversation with Grady, he sees GenAI as another tool that lowers the barrier for building software, but which doesn’t fundamentally change engineering practices or software architecture.
This year, the Pragmatic Engineer harked back to the dawn of software engineering with the 50-year-old classic engineering book, The Mythical Man Month. In half a century of computing plenty has changed, especially around developer productivity. But some things have not: estimating software projects remains challenging, prototyping is still a good way to start projects, and communication remains a massive challenge in large teams.
Software engineering will evolve with GenAI, but I don’t foresee the fundamentals of what makes a standout software engineer being turned upside down. I also expect more demand for standout engineers, not less.
3. Evolution of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter
Just as the software engineering field is evolving, we also keep iterating and tweaking how to help you stay on top of this fast-moving field. Here are the biggest changes you might have noticed this year.
More “pragmatic” research. This year, we published more in-depth articles based on practical industry research than in any year before. I say “we” because this year Elin Nilsson joined the publication as Tech Industry Researcher. Like me, Elin is a software engineer; having spent seven years at Spotify in mobile and platform engineering teams.
Without Elin’s efforts, some popular deep dive articles might have not happened, including:
How Bluesky was built and what the engineering culture is like
… and others
It’s great to have Elin on the team. With double the firepower on research, you can expect to see more of this kind of practical, and deeply interesting research and deepdives to come. You can also suggest to us interesting areas that could be worth researching.
The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast has been a major addition to our content output. Long-time readers may remember in-depth interviews, such as:
Platform teams with Ganesh Srinivasan (then-Chief Product and Tech Officer of Confluent)
Developer productivity with Adam Rogal (director of developer platform at DoorDash)
Developer tools with Steve Yegge (then-head of engineering at Sourcegraph)
These interviews were a lot of fun to record, and I transcribed them into written articles. But I remember thinking it was a pity that people could hear the conversations, so I’d always had the idea that something like a podcast would be good. In the end, Lenny Rachitsky, who writes the excellent Lenny's Newsletter, gave me the final push to launch the Pragmatic Engineer podcast when we grabbed coffee in the Bay Area. Thank you!
In the short time since the pod started, it has hosted industry legend Grady Booch (co-creator of UML, a software architecture pioneer, and fellow at IBM), one of the best-known software engineers experimenting with GenAI, Simon Willison (co-creator of Django), Notion’s first native iOS and Android engineer, and many other interesting guests. See all episodes here.
Like the newsletter, the podcast focuses on software engineering at Big Tech, startups, and elsewhere. Every episode is full of pragmatic approaches for building stuff whether you’re a software engineer or a manager.
In 2025, guests will include Kent Beck (creator of extreme programming, and co-author of our Response to McKinsey) Dr. Nicole Forsgren (cofounder of DORA, lead author of Accelerate, co-author of SPACE), Charity Majors, software engineer, cartoonist, and musician Manu Cornet, the software engineer who wrote the most code at Meta for years, one of the first WhatsApp engineers, and other interesting techies.
In your podcast player, search for “The Pragmatic Engineer” and add it to your list to get episodes when they’re published.
The Pragmatic Engineer tracks the pulse of the tech industry, identifying trends early, months before major news outlets cover them, if they ever do. Examples include how GenAI is reshaping tech hiring, how some startups could be successfully challenging GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code, the split of remote software engineering jobs shrinking, longer hiring processes for engineering managers, and more.
Major news orgs don’t report many of the topics we cover – likely because they’re specific to software engineering – or they cover them months after this publication; for example, Business Insider reported on shrinking middle management a full 18 months after we first analyzed the trend.
4. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook
I published The Software Engineer’s Guidebook a year ago, after four years of writing it. Originally, I hoped to publish with a well-known publishing house. However, my pitch was rejected by two tech book publishers, and significant edits were requested by a third, which I believed would “dumb down” the book, by adding features like “word of the day” and examples involving Alice and Bob.
I decided to write the book according to my original plan, and self-publish it. I did not share this at the time, but deep down I was concerned: what if the publishers were right, and there was no demand for this type of book? It’s more of a reference book than one to be read in one go, cover to cover. It’s intended to serve as a way to help “debug” your career, topic by topic; be it figuring out how to improve at software architecture, or hitting the next career level at a scaleup or Big Tech.
In the end, demand was far higher than I anticipated. Just over 33,000 copies were sold in the first 12 months. A detailed breakdown:
87% print sales (around 29,000)
13% e-books (circa 4,500)
Where most people bought the e-book:
Kindle (55%)
From my online store, DRM-free (40%)
Apple iBooks (3%)
Google Play (1%)
Kobo (1%)
I was pleasantly surprised to see direct purchases so high, compared to Kindle. This is especially true as Amazon takes 65% of the book purchase price, thanks to its monopolistic pricing practices.
Countries with the most purchases, in order: US, Germany, UK, India, Canada, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Sweden. These are all the countries that Amazon supports on-demand printing. Sadly the print book only ships from these Amazon marketplaces. This is one downside of self-publishing!
Translations are published, with more to come. The book has been published in German and Korean. Translations currently being prepared include Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Mongolian, and Hungarian.
For the Korean translation, the publisher worked with five prominent Korean engineers and CTOs on an additional section with a local perspective and additional practical insights for career growth.
Getting feedback from first-time readers is very rewarding. Yes, it’s nice for the book to be a commercial success, mostly thanks to the economics of self-publishing, but the best thing is that engineers still find it helpful, years after the observations and advice were written. I’ve gotten messages from engineers who managed to speed up their career growth, and managers who helped their team develop professionally.
Here’s one reader’s messages sent in August:
“This May, I bought the Software Engineer's Guidebook on Amazon and read it as fast as I can. But it is not possible to read this book fast - because it is packed with so many useful insights and actionable advice.
I wanted to thank you for this book. It is the best general engineering book on tech that I've read for a long time. I took advice outlined in getting things done, being visible and starting a work log of the things that I did.
Just recently, I was promoted to a senior position!”
The audiobook is out now on all platforms, except Audible. I submitted the book to Audible at the same time as everywhere else, so as and when Audible approves the book, it will be available there, too. Until then, you can get it everywhere else.
Thank you
Writing The Pragmatic Engineer – and now, hosting the eponymous podcast – is the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my career. Thanks so much for making this possible by reading the articles and getting involved in the conversations.
We’re taking a break until the start of January, and I hope you get to kick back this holiday season. If you’re due to be on call over Christmas and the new year, fingers crossed that it’s a quiet shift!
Season’s greetings and a Happy New Year; we’ll be back with renewed energy in 2025!
Merry Christmas and thanks for all the high-quality content!