The Pragmatic Engineer: Year One
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
Engineering planning with RFCs, Design Documents and ADRs 🔒
Measuring software engineering productivity 🔒 by Laura Tacho
Engineering culture deep-dives
Platform teams
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
Career
Engineering career paths at Big Tech and high-growth startups 🔒
Dealing with a low-quality engineering culture at Big Tech 🔒
From software engineer to Senior Director of Engineering: Louie Bacaj 🔒
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
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 🔒
The Scoop
The perfect storm causing an insane tech hiring market (2021)
The hiring market (2021) 🔒
#2: The hiring market (2022) 🔒
#22: Freezes at Microsoft, hiring slowdowns across the industry 🔒
Other
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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