The Pragmatic Engineer: Year One

All of the articles published in the first year of the publication, grouped by topic.

👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at big tech and high-growth startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. Subscribe to get this newsletter every week 👇

Update in November 2023: if you’d like to browse all of the articles published up to November 2023, you can do so here:

It’s getting close to a year since I announced that I am starting this newsletter. 30th of August will mark the first year of sending out the first article, The seniority rollercoaster.

Over the first year, 86 newsletter issues went out, with a total word count between 400-500,000 words. That’s a solid 5 or so books’ worth of reading, taking a length of 100,000 words - common for longer nonfiction books - as a metric. The longest standalone article is Part 2 of Inside Facebook’s Engineering Culture at 14,000 words (or ~70 pages). The two-part series of Inside Facebook’s Engineering Culture could be a short book itself, with ~21,000 words (about 110 print pages).

On top of this, I published 29 templates and resources for software engineers and engineering managers.

With so many articles and so much reading, I organized these articles by topic. Articles marked by 🔒mean they are for paid subscribers. In the first year, 17 articles went out to free subscribers - which is about every fifth article. I’ve also opened up The perfect storm causing an insane tech hiring market recently, which started what would become The Scoop series.

With this, the list of articles:

Engineering approaches

• How Big Tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

• Incident review and postmortem best practices

• Healthy oncall practices 🔒

• Migrations done well 🔒

• Shipping to production 🔒

• ​​Engineering planning with RFCs, Design Documents and ADRs 🔒

• Measuring software engineering productivity 🔒 by Laura Tacho

• Efficient remote work for tech teams 🔒 by James Stanier

• Software Engineers Leading Projects: Part 1 🔒 & Part 2 🔒

• Designing a payment system 🔒 by Alex Xu

Engineering culture deep-dives

• Inside Amazon's engineering culture 🔒

• Inside Facebook’s engineering culture: Part 1 🔒 and Part 2 🔒

Platform teams

• The platform and program split at Uber 🔒

• Platform teams with Ganesh Srinivasan, Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Confluent 🔒

• Platform teams and developer productivity with Adam Rogal, Dir. Developer Platform at DoorDash 🔒

Hiring, compensation, onboarding, retaining, attrition

• Hiring and retaining a diverse engineering team

• Hiring junior software engineers 🔒

• Hiring software engineers 🔒

• Hiring an engineering manager 🔒

• Growing a junior-heavy team🔒

• Preparing for the annual or biannual planning 🔒

• Retaining software engineers and engineering managers 🔒

• A CTO’s guide to remote compensation strategies 🔒 by Sergio Pereira

• Oncall compensation 🔒

• Preparing for layoffs in tech 🔒

• Good attrition, bad attrition for software engineers 🔒

Career

• The seniority rollercoaster

• Becoming a better writer

• Engineering career paths at Big Tech and high-growth startups 🔒

• Onboarding to a new company 🔒

• Starting the New Year on the right foot 🔒

• Preparing for promotions ahead of time 🔒

• Finding the next company to work at 🔒

• Dealing with a low-quality engineering culture at Big Tech 🔒

• From software engineer to Senior Director of Engineering: Louie Bacaj 🔒

• 20 Years of software engineering with Malte Ubl 🔒

• Ways staff and principal engineers get stuck (and how to get unstuck) 🔒

• Navigating the individual contributor to engineering manager transition 🔒 by Diego Ballona

Other topics on Big Tech and high-growth startups

• Engineering leadership skill set overlaps 🔒How EM, PM, TLM and TPM positions overlap

• Profit centers vs cost centers at tech companies 🔒

• Working with product managers: advice from PMs

• Working with product managers as an engineering manager or engineer 🔒

• What TPMs do and what software engineers can learn from them

• Scaling engineering organizations with the Technical Program Manager role 🔒

• Working with a non-technical CEO 🔒 by Paulo André

The Scoop

• The perfect storm causing an insane tech hiring market (2021)

• Inside Fast’s rapid collapse

• Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time

• Inside the layoffs at Klarna 🔒

• Follow-up: the insane tech hiring market (2021) 🔒

• More follow-up on the tech hiring market (2021) 🔒

• The hiring market (2021) 🔒

• #2: The hiring market (2022) 🔒

• The tech hiring market: 2022 predictions 🔒

• #3: A chilling or boiling tech hiring market? 🔒

• #4: Remote work and Interacting with Recruiters 🔒

• #5: Return to the office and SO Jobs shutting down 🔒

• #6: The start of the Great Reshuffle? 🔒

• #7: Bonus payouts accelerating the Great Reshuffle 🔒

• #8: A tech market slowdown starting? 🔒

• #9: Big changes at Twitter, Netflix, Apple and Robinhood 🔒

• #10: Another chill hitting the tech market 🔒

• #11: The tech boom is over 🔒

• #12: Layoffs upon layoffs 🔒

• #13: Business as usual in parts of the market 🔒

• #14: The crypto bust 🔒

• #15: A reality check for the public tech markets 🔒

• #16: Why doesn’t AWS add spending limits? 🔒

• #17: Dotcom bust vibes 🔒

• #18: Big Tech joins the tech cooldown 🔒

• #19: The start of a tech winter? 🔒

• #20: The e-commerce growth bubble pops 🔒

• #21: One deep layoff or death by a thousand cuts? 🔒

• #22: Freezes at Microsoft, hiring slowdowns across the industry 🔒

Other

• Real-world engineering challenges #1, #2, #3, #4

• Holiday tech and business book recommendations

• War in Ukraine - and its impact on the tech industry

• Understanding unicorn valuations via Eric Newcomer 🔒

• The tech downturn by Eric Newcomer 🔒

• Community thread: Measuring engineering productivity, What makes healthy engineering teams? What approach helped adopt new engineering practices?

Alternatively, browse all newsletter issues or all The Scoop issues.

I hope this summary was useful, and that you found an article or two that you might have missed. I’ll follow up with learnings from the first year, and plans for the next one in a separate, bonus issue.

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