The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The state of the 2023 tech market (Friends)

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Gergely Orosz is back for our annual year-end update on the tech market, writ large. How is hiring? Has AI really changed the game? What about that OpenAI fiasco? We also talk in-depth about Gergely's self-published book, The Software Engineer's Guidebook, which has been four years in the making.

Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show about insanity operators. Thanks to our partners for helping us bring you world-class developer pods each and every week. Fassy.com, fly.io, and typesense.org. Okay, let's talk. We're here with our good friend, Gerge Oros. Gerge, it's good to see you. Good to hear from you. It's our annual, I guess, conversation. It feels like just really recently, Jared. Doesn't it feel like it was just maybe a month ago or so that we talked to him? I feel like this year's gone by so fast. It feels recent, but a lot has changed, and it has been a year. So welcome back, man.

It's been a year, and that's our annual tradition. I'm really glad to be back. Always good to catch up. It feels like a year goes by really quickly, but then a lot of stuff just completely changes as well. I do want to highlight the phenomenal title, Jared. I feel like we have to for the last one, because the second to last one was this

insane tech hiring market, and then it was basically the same title, but with a bang in front of insane, so this not insane tech hiring market. We got a lot of feedback about that title saying like, just genius tiling, you know? The nerds loved it. Yes. Well, we negated that sucker.

It worked out well. What kind of operator should we put on it this year, Gergay? Is it a insane tech hiring market? Is it a not insane? Is it an average? What's your feeling in the end of 2023? Well, I feel it's the question mark, hiring mark. Everyone is trying to figure out where are we?

But more importantly, where is it going to go? Do we have an option to go back at some point to that more insane? I think people are hoping for that. But in reality, there's a bit of a worry and a reality that maybe we've seen the very best hiring market as software engineers in terms of the best opportunities, the best demand around in 2021, 2022, or even between 2010 all the way to 2022. And there's a bit of a worry that maybe that's not going to return, which honestly, you know, it might not be a bad thing.

It's change. I feel it's the quickly changing hiring market. Yeah. Well, we have a lot of relationships inside of large tech brands, and I would say that we see those relationships change frequently. So as an organization who interfaces with many large brands in our tech space, seeing the folks that we work with closely change pretty much year after year. It's either they've moved on, something happened internally, I sent an email and suddenly we're coordinating something and then that email is returned by the bot that says, you know, this email doesn't exist anymore. It is far more frequent and I feel like every time I talk to somebody, I have to say, congratulations, you're still here. Please catch me if you think things are changing and, you know, they may be experiencing a surprise to some degree but i feel personally that

the change has been very frequent even today you know but i kind of see a positive uptick i don't see us going back to the sheer volumes of 2021 2022 i think that was that may have been the best of what's to come maybe for the next decade i think maybe the big player might be the way that you know this hype cycle of ai has really happened big this year and i'm not suggesting we go deep on it but i think when we talk about the what may happen with software development there's a lot of things happening around artificial intelligence that aid a development team and in what way does it help them it helps them with observability it does it help them? It helps them with observability. It helps them with database schema. It helps them with all these unique things

that just was not there last year, really. It's a brand new thing. And I'm wondering how we'll augment teams and whether or not that actually changes hiring practices. Well, this is what I'm second guessing. And I think this is a little bit hard to extrapolate. And here's why. Like around, like, let's say I wasn't there,

but I read the story of what happened when the compiler first came out before the compiler people would just write their machine generated code off and onto a card and they would feed it into this big mainframe and it was a lot of work and that mainframe was very expensive so there was time sharing and you know developer time was very valuable the compiler just sped that up. It was a 10x improvement, literally. And what you would have expected is, well, you need fewer developers, right? Like one developer can do 10 times as many. But curious enough, the number of developers

has exploded since then, because there was more. And then after the compiler, we still had lower-level languages. We had these higher-level languages come off. Like, let's say we had C, and then we had obviously C++, but C Sharp or Java, which are more productive languages arguably, which again, it would have meant that you need fewer developers and it just kept exploding.

So again, with AI, of course it's going to make us more productive. I'm not saying necessarily 10 times as productive, but it will be easily 20, 30, 50%, who knows, depending on who we're talking to. And the logical thing would be we can do more with fewer developers, like we would need fewer developers. But again, looking back at the past, what always happened is we just had more developers because now what happened every single time is a lot of businesses that couldn't afford developers or development had this. A good example is website builders. Back in the 90s,

you all remember you had to hire a webmaster to build a web page and they had to maintain it and it was expensive. And so the bigger companies all had their webmasters, but small businesses didn't have it. Fast forward to today, you can just click and put together a website, but there's strangely not less demand for people building or tweaking websites. You know, there are specialists who are tweaking WordPress, etc. So my sense is that as long as technology is still spreading across the world, we will still see a demand rise. And technology is still not everywhere. And I'm kind of thinking that we might see a little bit different.

Until now, it's kind of gone into big tech and these amazing positions which pay very well and generate a lot of value. But here I am sitting, I get frustrated with my utility company, for example, how just awkward it is to pay, or public transport. Again, technology is there, but it's not particularly good. So I wonder what might happen if we see a lot of technology and technologists and good

software engineers end up at these places as well. Maybe work conditions improve, compensation improves, and our kind of quality of life improves. Because I'll be honest, my quality of life is not really driven by Facebook or Netflix. It's kind of driven by the more mundane thing, how easy it is to reach the local council. Why can I not do this online and so i i wonder if that part of like these businesses that are still not really digital are we going to see in the next 10 years a boom there of software maybe ai assisted going there and obviously software engineers building that so i'm kind of optimistic that that's going to happen you know ai makes everyone more productive for example small businesses until now building app, how much did it cost?

I don't know, like $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 to build a custom app. It was not affordable for a lot of small businesses. My trainer at the gym was telling me he really wants to build this app. He's got this dream of doing it. He cannot afford it. All these people might be able to do it through,

again, a little bit what happened with websites becoming point and click. It might happen with all sorts of apps. So I think it'll be super interesting, exciting. There will be demand increasing in a lot of these areas. I don't know about the rest, but so far I'm not seeing it sold out. However, one thing I will say,

this is the first time I'm seeing software engineers becoming worried about our jobs. Until now, let's just be honest. Like what we did is we kind of automated other people's jobs. Customer support. At every single company, customer support teams have been going down in headcount as software engineers. Not me, but I saw teams at Uber.

We were building more and more efficient ways to do it, adding machine learning, adding helpful tools so one human could serve more people. We were very proud of this and it was cost saving and now is the first time where software engineer asking like am i gonna automate myself out of a job and i hope the answer is no but we've never asked this question before so i think this is a big big change yeah i think that's on point and i think that specifically around the proliferation of ideas i mean if we've seen what's even happened this year, we're very much still in demo land of like, look what this can do. There's very few production grade rollouts of these things in scale. There's a few and they're impressive. But what I've seen is just like huge amounts of new ideas.

So much so that like I'm holding on for dear life just watching the demos scroll by. And I'm like, wow, look at all these new ideas. This is not going to create less software. This is going to create more software. And we're going to be working at a higher level. We're going to provide our value at a different place than we used to. But I think that example of like what the web did, you know, moving higher up the value chain and the abstraction level, maybe LLMs are the next compiler for the next 10 years and we're going to be way more productive

and that's just going to bring so many more people to the table who previously were just priced out. And I think it's net positive. I also feel like, think about, let's say to the web, these website builders, because that's a great example. I think that's been really commoditized. If you want to do a website today and you have no technical knowledge, you can absolutely do it, right? But then what happens when you built a website? You're a small business, you employ a few people, let's say you run a barbershop or

something and you built your own website, you clicked together, you're now starting to grow. Business is good, you're spending less on technology and it's bringing you a lot more value. You start to expand. You want to do custom stuff. And suddenly that point and click thing doesn't work. You now need to hire a professional who understands how your thing works and how the leading industry stuff works.

So you bring in those people. So I feel there's a little bit of, one thing that is a really big commodity these days is plumbing, for example. Like plumbing hasn't changed all that much in the past 50 years or so. And yet there's such a huge demand for plumbers who actually can get the work done. So I'm feeling that what's going to happen is if I just take that analogy, let's assume that there's not going to be much bigger demand increase,

which I don't believe is the case, but let's take a pessimistic view. There will still be a huge demand for software engineers to understand how these things work, to understand what is under the AI solution, to understand what is going on at the machine level in the cloud when you have an issue.

Like, how does the code execute? And could you just have some CPU issues? There's now a new generation of software engineers who don't really know too much about infrastructure, which is fine for the most part, except when you need to go deep. So I think the software engineers, the craftspeople who understand the whole stack

and have experience debugging and fixing issues, they will be very much in demand. And there's this joke of calling a repairman to fix this complicated machinery, and the repairman looks at it for 10 minutes and takes a hammer and hits it at one point and it starts to work and he charges $1,000. And I ask, like, $1,000? Like, why $1,000? He's like, well, $10 for the hammer

and $990 for knowing where to hit it. I think that's what's going to be software engineers. Don't forget that with all this AI stuff, software is going to be way more complicated. AI will generate more complicated software, so it's going to be harder to know what is going wrong. I've noticed as well when I'm using ChatGPT or some of the coding generators,

that they generate the code, but they are often incorrect, and you need to know what you need to know. So I feel the whole worry that we're going to be out of a job is not true. What is true is there will be the people who used to have a job, let's say from a boot camp, from doing two months and being able to do HTML and CSS.

That is no longer going to be marketable. You will need deeper skills. So my prediction is that to enter software engineering, we're going to go back to what every other craft has. You will need to study several years. How do you become an electrical engineer? I mean, you can self-study, but you probably won't get a job. Most people, unfortunately, go to college. I mean, it's just the reality. They learn a bunch of stuff that takes a lot of time, and then they enter the industry. I think that

will change, and that will change very quickly. You know who is out of a job, though? Stack Overflow, aren't they? I mean, Google. And I'm not even a heavy user of these tools. I'm kind of reserved in my use, but it's the first place I'm going to go already, and it's been six months. I mean, I haven't been to Stack Overflow in the last six months, and I'm a typical engineer.

I mean, what happens from here? I mean, we should talk about two things about Stack Overflow, right? One is, Joel Pol mean, what happens from here? I mean, we should talk about two things about Stack Overflow, right? One is Joel Polsky. What incredible timing in hindsight of how he sold it. And obviously, this is not someone who can read the future, but was it in 2020 or 2019 when he sold it for $1.8 billion to a private equity firm? We have to check the exact date,

but I do remember that this was before ChatGPT was even announced in preview. And shortly after the sale, it was announced in preview. It was still, people didn't assume it was such a big deal, but anyone paying attention could have thought that this might be damaging it. So the private equity company,

at the time, it looked like a great deal because they could obviously monetize it, maybe even take it public, just keep growing it because it kept growing. In hindsight, it was a perfect time to exit. If you knew anything about LLMs, then it was a great move in that sense. And now, honestly, Stack Overflow, I think,

just has a problem where to position themselves. What I understand, though, is having talked to both some people there, but also following up what they're publicly doing. Their focus is not really anymore the public site. I mean, it's still there, it's still driving traffic. What their bigger business focus is, and I understand is their biggest business income,

is offering Stack Overflow for teams, for companies, which can actually serve as a very powerful AI assistant. Because what we now know, the past month, I think there's several articles that these large language models like ChatGPT and Cloud, AI assistant. Because what we now know, the past month, I think there's several articles that these large language models like ChatGPT and Cloud, they cannot make up new facts. You need to feed all the data into them. So if as a company, I feel, again, I'm not the biggest expert on AI, so you'll have to find other people. But my understanding is like, we need to generate all

that data. And so we need to incentivize data. And so Stack Overflow could be in this great position that companies, they say, hey, use us and people will keep contributing the data that the AI cannot find. And so you're going to be more efficient because we might have this data drought soon enough that right now ChatGPT is amazing at giving coding suggestions

because they've been trained on Stack Overflow, but now no one's contributing to Stack Overflow. So the next version of, let's say TypeScript or whatever new language, it just might get worse. And then there's going to be this game of how do you incentivize people to actually contribute training data. Yeah, that's definitely interesting,

especially with the open web. I mean, as a publisher, of course, you have a direct relationship with your audience. So that's spectacular. But there are other publishers who have an indirect relationship with how they make money in their audience and what incentivizes them in the future

to crank out the news articles, to crank out the blog posts. Because the traffic's just not going to come anymore and that's how they get their money. Could we go back to Express Exchange? Do you remember what it was before Express Exchange? It was Express Exchange. It was a Q&A site where you saw the questions,

but to see the answers, first of all, you could pay an expert to answer, a human to answer, who hopefully gave you a good answer. And once they answered, it was hidden behind a paywall, and you needed to pay to unlock it. It didn't really work that well. It felt very scammy, lots of dark patterns. It was clearly making money,

but Stack Overflow came in to replace this model. work that well it felt very scammy lots of dark patterns it was clearly making money but stack overflow came in to replace this model but i'm saying this because i'm now starting to see some things uh going a little bit circular one good example going back because we're now back to how do you incentivize people you know people especially software engineers they're not stupid they're very smart every software engineers now know that whatever you contribute to a forum or to an open web, it will be used to train an AI, including your own blog, including to GitHub. And more and more of them will ask, what is my incentive to do so? Like I'll do it, but what do I get in return? Or what kind of noble cause am I helping? You know, people will probably be fine contributing to some open source AI or

something that benefits, but people are going to be a bit hesitant for private companies harvesting this data. So I think we'll see a behavior change. This is not going to be in the next six months, but I think the next five years, it'll alter drastically how much people are willing to just share their creative output. Right. You got to think about an AI that essentially counts credits, right? The AI consumes knowledge we put out there and how do you track the incentive? Well, if the AI can do it and then you say, well, what if the AI is biased? Well, isn't any pattern matching kind of biased, right?

Like if you pattern match towards a certain skew because you have either all the data and you can pattern match clearly, or you have limited data and you pattern match against what is truly not a holistic data set. Either way, you have a bias. And I'm just wondering if, if we'll get to a place and future Adam or somebody out there come back to this, cause this might be accurate. What if in like 10 years, something like this gets done and humanity says, you know what? We are so biased as humans because we have emotion and we have all this humanity and all this humanistic tendencies in us that we have to program the AI to the perfect human nature and let the bias be in the data right and then humanity evolves its knowledge based upon what it puts back in and the ai creates credits of sorts that says you know what jared is literally better than adam or adam is literally better than jared and gare gay because his contribution is so much greater and the perfect human nature biased AI is all-knowing.

A real meritocracy. I don't know. I think I just stack overflowed right there. I don't know. You went too deep on me. That seems pretty plausible. I think this sounds too simple and the world is way more messy, more unpredictable. But also, you you know like looking

back it's so easy to see the patterns like i'm i'm always hesitant to predict what will happen but you know the interesting thing about like this whole ai thing is i'm the longer i'm in tech the more i'm realizing that technology is really interesting exciting and it's a fun part but the real messy part and the thing that is the hardest to figure out is humans what's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by our friends at Neon. Serverless Postgres is exciting and we're excited. And I'm here with Nikita Shamganov, co-founder and CEO of Neon.

So, Nikita, one thing I'm a firm believer in is when you make a product, give them what they want. And one thing I know is developers want Postgres. They want it managed and they want it serverless. So you're on the front lines. Tell me what you're hearing from developers. What do you hear from developers about Postgres managed and being serverless? So what we hear from developers is the first part resonates. Absolutely.

They want Postgres. They want it managed. The serverless bit is 100% resonating with what people want. They sometimes are skeptical, like, is my workload going to run well on your serverless offering? Are you going to charge me 10 times as much for serverless that I'm getting for provision? Those are like the skepticism that we're seeing, and then people are trying, and they're seeing that the bill arriving at the end of the month and like, well, this is strictly better. The other thing that is resonating incredibly well is participating in the software development lifecycle. What that means is you use databases

in two modes. One mode is you're running your app and the other mode is you're building your app. And then you go and switch between the two all the time because you're deploying all the time. And there is a specific part when you're just building out your application from zero to one, and then you push the application into production, and then you keep iterating on the application. What databases on Amazon, such as RDS and Aurora and other hyperscalers,

are pretty good at is running the app. They've been at it for a while. They learned how to be reliable over time. And they run massive fleets right now, like Aurora and RDS run massive fleets of databases. So they're pretty good at it. Now, they're not serverless. At least they're not serverless by default. Aurora has a serverless offering. It doesn't scale to zero. Neon does. But that's really the difference.

But they have no say in the software development lifecycle. So when you think about what a modern deploy to production looks like, it's typically some sort of tie-in into GitHub, right? You're creating a branch, and then you're developing your feature, and then you're sending a PR. And then that goes through a pipeline, and then you run GitHub Actions, or you're running GitLab for CICD, and eventually this whole thing drops into a deploy into production. So databases are terrible at this today. And Nian is charging full speed

into participating in the software development lifecycle world. What that looks like is Nian supports branches. So that's the enabling feature. Git supports branches, Nian supports branches. Internally, because we built Nian, we built our own proprietary. And what I mean by proprietary

is built in house, you know, the technology is actually open source, but it's built in house to support copy and write branching for the Postgres database. And we run and manage that storage subsystem ourselves in the cloud. Anybody can read it, you know, it's all in GitHub under Neon database repo. And it's quite popular. There are like over 10,000 stars on it and stuff like that. This is the enabling technology. It supports branches. The moment it supports branches, it's trivial to take your production environment and clone it, and now you have a developer environment. And because it's serverless, you're not cloning something that costs you a lot of money and imagining for a second that every developer

cloned something that costs you a lot of money in a large team, that is unthinkable, right? Because you will have 100 copies of a very expensive production database. But because it is copy and write and compute is scalable, so now 100 copies that you're not using, you're only using them for development, they actually don't cost you that much. And so now you can arrive into the world where your database participates in the software development lifecycle, and every developer can have a copy of your production environment for their testing, for their feature development. We're getting a lot of feature requests, by the way, there. People want to merge those data, or at least schema, back into production.

People want to mask PII data. People want to reset branches to a particular point in time of the parent branch or the production branch or the current point in time, like against the head of that branch. And we're super excited about this. We're super excited. We're super optimistic. All our top customers use branches every day. I think it's what makes Neon modern.

It turns a database into a URL and it turns that URL to a similar URL to that of GitHub. You can send this URL to a friend, you can branch it, you can create a preview environment, you can have dev test staging, and you live in this iterative mode of building applications. Okay, go to neon.tech to learn more and get started. Get on-demand scalability, bottomless storage, and data branching. One more time, that's neon.tech. And let's just look at OpenAI, right?

I was hoping you were going to say that. They're right now the most hyped AI company. They're also the one that objectively is shipping the most visible things. And they have the most users. They passed 100 million weekly users in less than a year with ChatGPT. And yet the company almost was in turmoil and maybe close to ceasing to exist because of a few people in their leadership team having disagreements. And it just comes to show, I think there was this joke of OpenAI wants to align, AI makes sure that

it is aligned, but they couldn't align themselves as a group of people. And I think there's an interesting question that goes back, there's a question of what does AI do, but there's a question of who controls the AI? What is a group of people and what are their goals and what constraints do they set and how do they program that?

That's going to be just as important just as messy yeah yeah what a fiasco that was i mean it was a good week to be an internet denizen and just like watch it unfold like over the course of 72 hours uh what was your coverage what were you doing during that time i'm sure you wrote about it but uh what were your thoughts throughout yeah so I was initially just following along because like everyone, I just couldn't really believe what was happening. It was just so shocking that I had literally finished an article talking with one of the head of engineering, one of the two head of engineering at ChatGPT, Evan Ravka, who was one of the first engineers on ChatGPT. Three years ago, he joined this small team called Applied. There were six people in OpenAI. So OpenAI back then in 2020, it was about 150 people and 144 of them were research people. They were just building these really cool models that would eventually become chat GPT. And they hired a team to turn this into Applied. And he

was one of the first six people, first engineering manager. In three years, they grew to 150 people. And only one year ago, they decided to launch ChatGPT. So they were building some cool stuff on the side, which was very surprising to me. And apparently, they built ChatGPT in a few weeks. They launched it. It became very successful. They could barely keep up with demand,

and they kept scaling up. And one of the problems that they had, which we didn't write about, but we might have a follow-up, they were short on GPUs. Even though they had all the access to Microsoft, they were short on GPUs. And there was a lot of really fun engineering challenges that I hope to come back and cover one day. It's fascinating. I had just finished this article, which was fascinating on how quickly they responded. And what was really interesting about OpenAI is I talked with a software engineer, and Avon is a software engineer. He was telling me, he told me, like, look, like this whole chat GPT, it's kind of a black box that predicts things really well. And we know it works well.

And our job is to productionize it as an engineering team. And what they did is they hired very senior engineers. They operated like a startup. They moved very fast. And it felt to me that they could execute so quickly because because again, they had engineers with 10 plus years of experience in large scale environments. They just knew what to build. They're very motivated.

And interesting enough, they worked in one office location, which apparently worked really, really well. So there's this whole debate on remote or not remote. From my understanding, OpenAI would have never been as successful if they were not located in the same location. And they could afford this, they could pay people, they could motivate people, and so on. So I had just finished this,

and it was just a really good example of how open AI is moving so fast. And then as I published it, their CEO was fired, even though the company is doing extremely well. It seems no one can stop. And I made this joke on social media that it seems we were wondering who could stop OpenAI and it's themselves. It felt from the outside they were sabotaging themselves. As I was thinking back, when was the last time we've seen such a shocking CEO firing? Travis Kalanick, for example, was fired from Uber, but it was not really unexpected because the company was struggling. But when you see a company doing amazingly well, just going up, up, up, and they're about to close this $86 billion round, and I think everyone's expecting that they're on the

way to become a trillion dollar company. And I think the only thing that we could all think of was Steve Jobs being fired from Apple. But actually, when Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, Apple was not doing that great. So you could argue there was a bit more to it. And I think we all just like, I followed the drama along. I figured this is the end of Sam Altman. Then there was a revolt from employees, the board surprisingly going quiet. My biggest surprise from the whole saga

was that Sam was fired Friday. How Sachin Adela was the one. He felt like he was a spokesperson for OpenAI. He sprung into action. He sprung into action. He started to communicate what was happening at OpenAI, even though OpenAI was arguably a way, way smaller

company than Microsoft. And then on Monday, he went on a press tour. And then he came up with a solution, which in hindsight, maybe it was more of a tactic of hiring everyone from OpenAI, but apparently they opened. So my biggest surprise was how OpenAI is so darn important for Microsoft, incredibly important. And my biggest, biggest surprise was that they want to keep them independent. They would not really prefer that OpenAI operates independently. They get the benefit of their research and they're applied and they don't really want it inside of Microsoft

I'm assuming because of the scrutiny so it was really fascinating and I think this whole event just broke the image of OpenAI being this unbeatable company for example, now I think a lot of people are looking at Antrofic, their models are doing pretty well they just didn't have this drama. They could. Everyone could. My biggest takeaway is I feel this field is super volatile.

I think until now, what we've seen is these companies move really fast, and we were wondering, how can they move this fast? But they actually don't have it all figured out. It's not sustainable, yeah. It's not sustainable. They will need to slow down to get stability. Or they keep rushing, and they'll be extremely unstable, just like OpenAI is right now so i'm assuming things are probably like i'm not envying any of the

people there the only thing i will really commend is it seems the team has come together for a cause like that team is has agreed like the employees that they're supporting this cause they want to work with this leader which is again unparalleled to see almost 95% of people sign some petition that they put up together. So it feels to me like that is a great sign for any company. Like they're in this together. As far as I know, no one took up the offer of jumping ship for the same composition as Salesforce. So I think it's just very confusing. There's lots of really positive things about opening AI,

but I feel up there, there's too many questions with the leadership right now and how stable their leadership really is and their vision. Funny joke I heard when it became clear that everything was pretty much going to land where it had begun in terms of employer and all of that was somebody said, I feel sorry for that one Microsoft IT worker who has to return 770 MacBooks back to Apple.

Yeah, that was also crazy, right? I think we read that Satya and Nella agreed that they don't have to use Teams to appease them. Yeah, they don't have to use Microsoft Teams. So many just entertainment nuggets that came out during that time period. And such a weird thing. And then just to have it all kind of land where it started. But yeah, the view of the inside of the leadership at OpenAI and the disagreements and just the weirdness of their board and their company structure, whatever it is, the entity. I guess in a sense, I like it because it's going to provide more diversity in the space.

We're going to take other companies more seriously, where it just felt like OpenAI had such a huge lead and just continued to, like you said, just launch and improve. And every time you turn around, ChatGPT was better, and they were integrating other people's stuff, it looked like. It felt super human. So even when I talk with Ivan, it just seemed they did everything perfectly or even better and just made no mistakes,

which again, we're all human, so I agree with you. I think it was good to see that they're human, they make mistakes, it's people working there, and they're not special. Of course, again, they came up with a really good apply, but I think because of this, again, if ChatGPT is a little bit better or even a lot better than all the other models,

the others are going to catch up. We know it's the same people working there, same faults, same kind of approaches. What we've seen is OpenAI has capitalized and they have moved a lot faster than their competitors for different reasons. Seems like the real winner in all this is NVIDIA. Doesn't it?

I think a little bit of as anthropic as well. The big question about open AI is what do they care about? Do they care about moving fast or AI safety? Because this was the big argument internally. Right, and they can't decide. I don't think they can decide. My sense is they're moving fast. And I think that's by the way,

I think that is a right strategy for a Silicon Valley company that wants to maximize its value for the employees, the shareholders, and its market size. I think, and they have been moving the fastest, whereas Anthropic is really principled saying they are safety first, and they're also moving at a good speed. So I think they're projecting a lot more stability. And I'm now seeing on social media a lot more people sharing Cloud as examples, their chatbot. And I'm also just going to try it out as well to compare. And just keep it in mind that there's not only one player in this space.

And Trophic is very tempting because they're also independent. Google has BARD. Yeah, what's their story? I don't know much about them. Their story is that some OpenAI employees were actually unhappy with how decisions were made at OpenAI and how they felt safety was not as much prioritized as they would have hoped. And so they started Antropic, where they said safety is our number one, we're going to build on that, and they just took it from there. So it's almost like a fork of OpenAI with a bit of a different focus, but I think

we're now starting to see that the principles do matter on the mid and long term, on the short term, speed is everything. And so I think it'll be fascinating to see, like, I'm really rooting for all of these companies, by the way, like, I think I will always be rooting personally for the smaller ones a lot more than, you know, rooting for the big guys, Microsoft, Google, etc, to grow and be bigger. So I hope open AI and Trophic and other startups that come and fill the space, they will succeed. But what I feel is these companies have,

OpenAI has rapidly gone through the startup phase and now they're almost big tech. They now rapidly have to mature, which is going to be painful because I worked at a company that went through this maturing at Uber. It's not as fun. It's not as fun working at a larger company than it is at a smaller one.

To make it fun, you need a really good founder. And that's where NVIDIA is super interesting. They're now a big company and people just love the CEO. I was in the US a few weeks ago and I caught up with a friend who works at NVIDIA and he was telling me that Jensen, people adore him.

They don't have to go into the office, but when Jensen goes in all hands and he speaks on the all hands he kind of freestyles the whole thing answers every question doesn't come with notes and it's just very passionate everyone is in the office like everyone goes to see him so like to me the big surprise in all of this thing is i feel when we talk about big tech i used to always think microsoft uh google amazon netflix apple and absolutely ignored nvidia and now they're by market cap they're like six or seven biggest company by the growth they're the biggest but we somehow still don't think of them like that so i

i don't know too much about them but i will i am planning to learn on more and i have some friends who used to work at google and other places now at nvidia and they're very happy and you know right right now they're doing good and as you said they're clearly the biggest winners of all of this right now they are well they get the benefit from it all right i mean they get to get their ei and keep it too i mean they have the all the gpus out there so everything is powered by what they're building so right now but for how long that's the question yeah yeah nothing lasts forever that's for sure but i think it does help to have a charismatic leader that can you know be there answer questions as you mentioned you know that's and i feel a very down-to-earth leader like he

don't forget he was the only leader when the stocks were going down last year and most public companies even facebook gave in into investor pressure to fire 10 or whatever to show to investors that we're firing that we're cutting costs we care and then the stock recovered and they just rehired like facebook is a prime example they're hiring like crazy right now so they're probably gonna my again i don't have the data but my sense is they're probably gonna go back to headcount to where they were before all this firing. NVIDIA did not do this. Their stock wasn't doing that bad, but since Jensen was there, they haven't fired, and he's been very clear about this. He's been holding his back against investors, and also they're the only

company that I know, Big Tech, apparently their official motto is that our company could go out of business in 30 days. So there's a sense of urgency that is just always there. Yeah, I don't know. I've now listened to Jensen a couple of times on a couple of podcasts. I just don't know any other CEO who just sounds so honest and down to earth.

Normal. Yeah. He doesn't sound like business, which, again, it's probably Sachin Adela is also very relatable. He's done a great job at Microsoft, but it does fill me with some hope that we're seeing some of the human

CEOs succeed as opposed to the ones that are just doing death marches or sticking a vision and not caring about anyone else. The evil villains. What's up, friends? I'm here with one of our good friends, Firas Aboukdij. Firas is the founder and CEO of Socket.

You can find them at socket.dev. Secure your supply chain. Ship with confidence. But, Firas, I have a question for you. What's the problem? What security concerns do developers face when consuming open source dependencies what does socket do to solve these problems so the problem that socket solves is when a developer is choosing a package there's so much potential information they could look at right i mean at the end of the day they're trying to get a job done right there's a feature they want to

implement they want to solve a problem so they go and find a package that looks like it might be a promising solution. Maybe they check to see that it has an open source license that has good docs, maybe they check the number of downloads or GitHub stars. But most developers don't really go beyond that. And if you think about what it means to use a good package to find it to use a good open source dependency, we care about a lot of other things too, right? We care about who is the maintainer? Is this thing well maintained? From a security perspective, we care about does this thing have known vulnerabilities? Does it do weird things? Maybe it takes your environment variables and it sends them off to the network, you know, meaning it's going to take your API keys, your tokens, like that would be bad. The unfortunate

thing is that today most developers who are choosing packages and going about their day, they're not looking for that type of stuff. It's not really reasonable to expect a developer to go and open up every single one of their dependencies and read every line of code, not to mention that the average NPM package has 79 additional dependencies that it brings in. So you're talking about just, you know, thousands and thousands of lines of code. And so we do that work for the developer. So we go out and we fully analyze every piece of their dependencies, you know, every one of those lines of code. And we look for strange things. We look for those risks that they're not going to have time to look for. So we'll find, you know,

we detect all kinds of attacks and kinds of malware and vulnerabilities in those dependencies. And we bring them to the developer and help them when they're at that moment of choosing a package. Okay, that's good. So what's the install process? What's the getting started? Socket's super easy to get started with. So we're, you know, our whole team is made up of developers. And so it's super developer friendly. We got tired of using security tools that send a ton of alerts and were hard to configure and just kind of noisy. And so we built Socket to fix all those problems. So we have all the typical integrations you'd expect, a CLI, a GitHub app, an API, all that good stuff. But most of our users use Socket through the GitHub app, and it's a really

fast install. A couple clicks, you get it going, and it monitors all your pull requests. And you can get an accurate and kind of in-depth analysis of all your dependencies. Really high signal to noise. You know, it doesn't just cover vulnerabilities. It's actually about the full picture of dependency risk and quality. So we help you make better decisions about dependencies that you're using directly in the pull request workflow, directly where you're spending your time as a developer. You know, whether you're managing a small project

or a large application with thousands of dependencies, Socket has you covered. And it's pretty simple to use. It's really not a complicated tool. Very cool. The next step is to go to socket.dev, install the GitHub app, or book a demo. Either works for us. Again, socket.dev.

That's S-O-C-K-E-T dot dev. When you mention Facebook hiring, are you paying attention to the uptick or neutral hiring processes of, I suppose, big tech at large, but something that gives us the judge the tea leaves against with the market rebounding or not rebounding? I'm keeping tabs on it as much as I can. I'm not hearing too much.

What I am hearing is Facebook has started to hire a lot. They're the only company who's really ticked up their hiring. Other companies are also, hiring just seems to be quietly coming back. I think I talked with some people at Google where they're getting headcount. Amazon hiring is back, even though Amazon also fired a lot of people with return to office. It feels to me that there's no massive hiring, but there's now, like I'm not hearing places that don't do backfills. And these companies, typically large tech companies, in a normal year, they would lose 10% of their headcount or 8% in terms of people leaving and backfilling. It seems this is a bit lower right now,

but still, for these companies to hire even 5% of a 100,000-person company, let's say there's 50,000 people working in software engineers at a company like Microsoft, I'm just guessing 5% of that would be, it's in the thousands. So I hear a lot of backfilling and open positions for more experienced engineers. Two areas that seem to be hiring a lot less, engineering leadership, engineering management. Most companies are reducing management layers. So there's less who are managing managers, sometimes going back to managing teams, so taking a step down. And new grads, new grad hiring seems to be very much down at a lot of these companies. I'll have to pay attention to if internship hiring will be back at Big Tech. Last year, at the Silicon Valley, most Big Tech did not hire interns.

Roblox did, for example. I spoke to a friend at roblox and this friend told me something really interesting first of all they were pretty surprised because they got all the graphs to choose from usually facebook takes the best grads you know and google and they're kind of left fighting for the rest so this year they could just choose sorry last year in 2022 that they could choose from all of them and then this manager told me something interesting they hired these grads in the spring they were working with them and he asked one of them. And then this manager told me something interesting. They hired these grads in the spring. They were working with them. And he asked one of them, like, hey, how are you doing? What are your friends up to? And this intern said, like, well, like a lot of my friends who didn't

get like the internships they were hoping for, they didn't get good offers. Some of them just went back to grad school for another two years and they're hoping the market will get better. And there's been a few people, apparently this is Silicon Valley, who have just changed from software. They just took to a different place. And another really interesting thing that I've heard that I think is very specific to the US is one of my friends who's a manager at one of these late stage startups. Her husband is a university professor somewhere in California. And he told me that during the lockdowns there's been a class that have was a pass fail instead of getting grades they were just pass fail and what he noticed is these classes are a lot worse in terms of capability so now you know he's

taking some of these classes that last year there was only class pass fail no grades and apparently he needs to dumb down the assignments because they just don't have the skills and she's also hiring some of these grads and she's saying that this whole pass fail year which is like one or two years is just not where it is before or after so she was like oh i think we'll have a problem like these graduates may be for no fault of their own they're not going to be as competitive on the workplace. They can probably catch up, but this is just so interesting on how something seemingly so small.

It's COVID. Let's make it a bit easier. Pass, fail. And on the workforce, managers notice. Professors notice. They're like, they're not working as hard.

They're kind of more kickback. You ask a lot of young kids these days. They want to be influencers, right? That's something that's cropped up as i want to teach people something i don't even know or learn something enough to teach people enough there's a lot of influencing or desire to be a star in those ways rather than i think put in the grind that we've all put in to learn what we learn to get where we're at now i worry like any i suppose 40 year old would worry about the prior generation and what they might come into

because well yes and no so like i think obviously this injection like it's funny because a lot of people like aspire young people out of college or even in college to become an influencer with you have lots of followers which is practically like description of me. I have a lot of followers on different social media platforms. You're an influencer? Well, I mean, I could be labeled that, but I really try not to be as such. Or my goal is to learn interesting things

and share these interesting things and also run a business on top of it. So I think of myself as just like the two of you, I run a business which happens to have a newsletter component, but I think of myself as just like the two of you. I run a business which happens to have a newsletter component, but I think of it as education and keeping up with the industry. I feel there's some people who are looking at influencing as a means to an end. I have a lot of followers and I'll somehow make money.

I'll do sponsorships or whatnot. Precisely. I think there's always going to be those people. And this path is open to more people. I think it's a lot harder than you think. And my honest view is I think it's always going to be those people. And this path is open to more people, I think, is a lot harder than you think. My honest view is, I think it's a terrible thing to only aim for having these large following numbers, because it can be taken away any time from you. These platforms, every single social media platform, you're at the mercy of whatever algorithm is there, and you can just have a big disappointment. What I think works a lot better, what I've seen multiple times, is people who have a business, a small business, or something that they do

that is generating most of their revenue or some of their revenue. And then on social media, they share something around that. There's a lot of, for example, photographers who do this on YouTube. They shoot stuff for clients and they often record how they do,

what gear they use. First of all, they don't stretch as much about how many views they get or how much ad revenue. It's kind of nice when it blows up, but they don't care too much. They're also just a lot more authentic. That's also what I try to do. I have a lot of followers in different platforms, especially Twitter and LinkedIn, these text-based ones. But most of my output is just me.

I'm researching my articles. My goal is to figure out what's going on in the market. And I often just get input. I sometimes share drafts. I don't really care if tomorrow the algorithm deprioritizes my views or I'll enroll in Twitter ad revenue because I want to see how much I can make. But I don't really care if it's zero or not. So it's just a nice bonus for me, but it not my main thing so that's what I'm trying to

to do but stepping aside from this like with worrying about the next generation I actually asked this engineering manager at Silicon Valley who's hiring new grads about Gen Z and like what do you think about Gen Z where you know the graduating generation either Gen Z or maybe the one after growing up with iPhones. And she was saying, I love them. It's amazing. They're just so engaged. They come into the workplace.

And I think in software engineering, product managers especially, she's more of a product-focused engineering manager. There's always been a problem if you hire a software engineer and you really want to get them interested in product. Talk to customers, understand them. And she's like, with this generation, you don't have that. They come in, they're like, all right, I've used the app. I've tried out our competitors. And she's like, with this generation, you don't have that. They come in, they're like, all right, I've used the app, I've tried out our

competitors, here's what I think we should be doing. She's like, amazing. So super engaged, really bright, really good at context switching. Really? Wow. Apparently very protective of their time as well. So they will say like, okay, it's like 6pm, I need to meet up with friends. Goodbye. Yeah, I've done all my work.

This is a generation that doesn't do anymore they're like oh well you know we'll put in the hours we'll just you know stay here for facetime and also they just i have some friends in europe uh europe is a little sore paste in a lot of companies they're complaining that they're quitting because they're bored and they don't see advancement and silicon valley my friend is like they're amazing because it's a startup it's fast moving they love it they're growing with it and they're going really fast so i actually feel like yes of course there's influencers but i feel that's a very small subset i hear very very good things about this like new generation who is entering the workforce and i i think it might give a run to the money for us

you know like people who've been here for a bit longer which is i think a great thing yeah yeah they're sharp well it's good to hear that they're coming into the workforce saying, I tried the app, I compared the competitors. Here's what we should do. I mean, that usually comes after a year or two because you kind of come in super green, like I have no idea how business works. I think that entrepreneurship has been pushed down to the younger generations to be like, I should be doing something in my teens, not because I want to make money, but because I want to understand the way the world works at an earlier age.

So that when I do enter the workforce or I consider it, I have a more clear understanding of directions I should go or whatnot. That also happens with wise parenting and involved parents. So not all that is on just simply society, but I think it is a societal thing where entrepreneurship is essentially more accessible to the younger generation. I mean, I ran papers when I was a kid. That's like the most common thing you could do when you're young.

I did not sell lemonade. I didn't have a lemonade stand. I would have done that. I shoveled snow for folks. I cut grass. Me and my friends had a grass business called BAD because it was Ben, Adam, and Donald. And so it was BAD. We were the bad crew, you know, we were in a good way. So that's kind of fun. But I mean, we did stuff like that as a young age. Now it's different. I was like, you can literally create a business as a young person and invent something because you have 3D printing accessible in your household. That just wasn't a thing when I was a kid. And you can invent a thing as a young person and make a small fortune.

Yeah, and also, we talked about AI. It's a really interesting question. We now have people coming into the workforce who are out of college or maybe even self-taught. Who is the biggest beneficiary of AI tools? Let's just take a co-pilot. And alternatively, Sourcegraph has Kodi, there's Tab9,

there's all these other ones. Clearly, it can speed you up. And my view is that there's two groups who will benefit hugely from it. One of them, surprisingly, is really experienced developers who master it,

who already know exactly how it works because they will spot immediately when it makes a mistake. It does hallucinate. It helps them context switch a lot faster. I haven't developed anything in TypeScript. I haven't really touched it for much, but I built

a website on site. I just used ChatGPT to generate. I knew what I wanted. I just didn't know the syntax and it just really helped me. Simon Willison, who's either the inventor of Django or one of them, he's a very well-known software engineer. He has got it into AI and using ChatGPT and doing a lot of cool stuff in the space and he actually said that he feels he's about 20% more productive which is a huge deal because he's a very productive software engineer he's now independent and he said it just makes him a lot more daring

he's now using all the technologies so senior engineers who master AI tools will be a huge advantage but also I think people who enter the workforce who are kind of AI native and figure out how to make the most of it to just get up to speed a lot quicker and not just fully learn from it as well. I think these two groups are going to potentially, they're going to overtake the group in the middle who is like, you know, we have some experience, but we're not sure about this AI thing. So I feel if you're a software engineer and you're not playing with AI tools

on how you can be more efficient, where its limitations are, you will be left behind by this younger generation who is starting, like day one, they literally start with chat GPT or whatever else they do. And they're going to very quickly put together, build, mock, okay, they'll make mistakes,

but they're going to learn. And again, don't forget that this generation, they're sharp. They context switch. And they're also thinking in terms of problems, product problems. Not necessarily software engineering problems, and they want to solve for it. Now I'm afraid that they're going to take our jobs. Heck, the AI, the kids. The kids are going to come take our jobs, Adam.

Isn't that how it works, anyways? That's how it should work,. Isn't that how it works? You know, anyways, that's how it should work. Yes, that is how it works. Let's not bury one of the leads here, which is your book. Haven't had a chance to thoroughly read it, but I did catch some of the chapters you put out there. So thank you for putting that look inside document out there because I was able to glean a little bit.

You know, who is this book for? What's the title? Because I didn't say it. And who is it for and how long did it take you to write it? Yeah, so the title is Software Engineer's Guidebook. And this was the book that I had been writing for a very long time. It was a book that I wanted to write while I was an engineering manager at Uber. So the story of this book is that I spent 10 years growing as a software engineer from the entry-level positions.

I was at some point a principal engineer at Skyscanner and then a senior engineer at Uber, so there's different levels. And at Uber, I was a manager and I helped people get promoted to the senior level, staff engineer levels, and so on on my team. And I just learned a bunch of stuff. The hard way, for example, promotions work, but the expectations are at a company like Uber, and Uber has similar expectations to the likes of Google, etc. And but the expectations are at a company like Uber, and Uber has similar expectations to the likes of Google, etc. And I was just mentoring people a lot on how to become better software engineers and how to go, for example, from a senior engineering level where you are expected to not only code, not only mentor, not only get things done and unblock your team,

but at the next level, you need to think more of how the business works. You need to coordinate teams. You need to lead which influence and not titles and so on. The time I decided to write this book is when I became a skip level manager. That meant that my team was too big. I now had a manager report to me who had another, I think, six people. So I had a team of maybe 20, 14 at the time reported to me and six people to this person. And I was having a one-on-one with one of the new joiners who was now my skip level. And this person asked for some advice on, you know, I'd like to potentially get to the next level. I think it was a software engineer too.

And how do I get the senior level? And I was thinking to myself, like, I could really help this person, but I'm no longer their manager. And it's not really appropriate for me to, you know, step over my manager. That's their job. But I do have a lot of expertise and experience to share. And especially when I talk with people outside of Uber, I sometimes have lunches with developers. They were just really confused on what it means to be a senior.

I got into an argument with a person who said, no, mentoring shouldn't be part of what a senior does. I'm like, yes, it does. At a place like Big Tech or even a larger scale, it's absolutely a part of it. And so there's a lot of confusion. So the book, I'd like to think it's for most software engineers, but in reality, it's a very good book for entry or mid-level software engineers, and also more experienced software engineers who have not worked at Big Tech. The book is probably the least useful for people who have worked at Big Tech or large-scale

startups, and they're past the senior level. It's not really for people who have a really good mentor who can navigate them on what it takes to grow up these companies. If you're at a company that has a really good career ladder and a good manager and you get good feedback, this book is not going to help you as much. And a third group that is for is for managers who want to help grow their engineers. Because the interesting thing is that this book is kind of partially written as my experience as a software engineer, kind of going up the ladder and just becoming a better professional.

As you become a better professional, you also grow in the levels, you get a fancier title, you get a bit more money, you get more responsibility. But then as a manager, I was on the other side, I was helping people get to there. And honestly, I just kind of wanted to document what does it mean to be a great software engineer at a mid to large size company? What I think it is, what are important things that you should know about?

For example, reliability. What are some of the basic concepts like the percentages P95, P99, P50? What are some on-call practices that you should just know about? That again, if you worked at a large company that has these, it's going to be like, yeah, I know all of this. We deploy with feature flags.

We have automated canary deploys. We have all these tools. We have platform teams. But if you're not, I kind of try to collect the things that were all aha moments to me. So I hope this book will democratize a little bit of how

those cutting edge tech companies work. You know. Think of Amazon, think of Uber, think of fast moving companies like Stripe. And the interesting thing is, as I was writing it, but it took a little bit longer. And then I started my newsletter in 2021. And as I wrote my newsletter, I really got involved with the industry, talking with different companies. For example, I did a deep dive in Facebook's engineering culture and Amazon's engineering culture. I started to see these gaps that, okay, this book should cover this and this and this as well. So in the end, I found it a really hard balance between how deep to go into the book and

how broad. I ended up going really broad and leaving a lot of breadcrumbs. I'm like, here's things that you can go into. I tried to cover everything that is relevant for a software engineer. And so far, the reception has been very good. The biggest criticism comes from people who are really experienced in big tech, who have been working at startups like a CTO, Will Larson, who's worked at Uber, worked at Stripe, worked at Calm. He's now the CTO of Carta. He said that, well, you know, like he thinks this book is really good for entry-level and mid-level people and people who have not moved around a lot of companies. And I think he's right. If you've been in industry, if you're a veteran, if you've been at these companies, it's more of a refresher and a

framework. But the feedback from people who have been in this industry for 20 years, working at consultancies or, I would say, mid-level tech companies, they said, oh my gosh, I would have needed this. This would have sped up my career with years because now I finally know what I need to know to get into these, I guess, higher-tier companies. For sure. Guy Book's a good name.

I like Chapter 18, Stakeholder Management. I think this is like, if you've been there, you kind of know. But what does it mean to have stakeholders? For sure. being in software development in a large organization because you may not know how to deal with a stakeholder. What inputs do you need from them? What kind of relationship should you have with them? You know, what does it take to keep them in the loop? And what's the ultimate goal of the relationship? And I think when you kind of answer that in this particular chapter, you need that. If you haven't been there, this is like, hey, when you are a senior engineer or a software

engineer in a tech company like this, these are expectations of what you experience. And it may not be exactly this, but a version of this, and this is normal. It was my goal. And one thing I wanted to do is, I'm going to be honest, like when I, I worked at a lot of different companies, which maybe helped my, my view. So my career was in Hungary. I worked at a local consulting company and then moved to UK to a small local consulting company. I then moved to JP to a small local consulting company. I then moved to JP Morgan, which was a bank, but it was not really a tech company, but it was a more prestigious company. It was at Skype, which was somewhat of a late-stage startup at the time, and then it became Microsoft. I went to Skyscanner, which was a 700-person scale-up,

European scale-up, and then I worked at Uber, which was just very high growth at the time. It was a true Silicon Valley company. When I I joined in 2016 it was the place where people were declining Google and Facebook offers probably until like 2017 so there were some really good people joining there and especially when I got to Uber I just didn't understand a lot of things like there was a lot of vocabulary that I didn't understand I was sitting in meetings I was just making notes of like I need to look up like what does this thing? Even simple things like a one-on-one, which is a one-on-one meeting with your manager, which at most companies or better companies, you have it every week. And I, for example, I had it at Microsoft, but it was really weird. My manager didn't know what it was. We just did it.

And I didn't realize that, well, to do it well, you as the employee should come prepared and say like, all right, here's manager, what I'd like to talk to you about. I'd like to talk about my career. Here's a sub that you should showcase your work and some of these tips. For example, with stakeholder management, I worked with stakeholders for many years, especially as a manager, and I just saw what the great engineers did. I'm trying to give the vocabulary and the structure of how you can think.

You don't need to follow it, but it gives you ideas. For example, with a stakeholder most people the stakeholder can be your product manager or the legal team who you're working with and a very simple thing is especially when you're at a staff level and you're it's kind of an expectation you just sit down and ask them what do you do like hey you work in a legal team can you tell me like what part of legal do you do because then they're going to explain to you and most people people get around to this after a while. You ask about their challenges. You just do some small talk with them.

Like, hey, do you have any kids? And again, these are things that usually it just takes a while to figure out because you start talking business. And if you do these things, you're going to be way more efficient. A tip that, for example, I learned very late is asking them to shadow in a meeting. Like literally the legal team you would ask, like they're having a meeting, like as a software engineer, can I go into your meeting and just sit in the corner, see what you guys are talking about on the legal meeting? It makes no sense because you're a software engineer. But when you're at the staff level and you need to understand the business, this is one of the best ways you can

do it. And again, most people, including staff level engineers, just don't do it. And if you do it, you're going to be way more efficient. So Tanya Ray, really, who wrote the really good book, The Staff Engineer's Path, which is an amazing book for staff level engineers, she just told me after she read the book that she just feels that this book will democratize when people sit in meetings. They just like, okay, I know what this means. I know what that means. Or if not, I can look it up. But I feel that I know what's going on in this space. And I try to kind of break it down. Everything I felt was intimidating or I didn't understand, I just put it in the book. I love it. So the book is 413 pages across 27 chapters. How do you know when you're done? How did you know this book is finished?

So here's the thing i self-published i originally wanted to write for the publisher i had some ideas i had some i really hoped i would work with one of these really big brands that i look up to and some authors that are back in 2019 i submitted this topic and i had like three kind of top book publishers in mind the first two rejected it, they rejected it in a nice way. Like it was a close call and they just felt that they had a competing title or something like that, which is how it works in the book industry, by the way. And then the third one said, yes, we want to publish. But with this third book publisher,

they actually turned out to be pretty opinionated and they wanted to make it a little bit more beginner friendly and they wanted to put some structure in place that I just didn't like. So in the end, I was like, okay, like I I feel I'm gonna fight with my publisher and it's just a lot of energy I'm just gonna write myself so the problem then with self-publishing is great because I can do whatever I want and I was pretty opinionated so I wasn't worried about what's right but you never know when you're done this was a problem and I was writing for on and off for about three and a half years and finally I just and i was writing for on and off for about three and a half years and finally i just and i was writing my newsletter as well and i i resisted

the urge to recycle things from the newsletter there's very little overlapping content there are a few chapters of the 27 i would say maybe there's four chapters that have been published in some form in the newsletter and they've been reworked but i just kept it separate because the newsletter is very what's happening right now and i wanted to write this book as like the stuff that is going to be relevant in five years and then it'll have to come a new revision so three and a half years I had a lot of stuff written I just decided I'm just gonna give myself a deadline which is what the publisher will give you yeah at the end of the deadline I had about 500 pages or 550 pages worth of text. So the last month I spent cutting it off and I just decided to put 100 pages as bonus chapters, which are available for free because

I wanted to keep the book at a reasonable length. And by the way, these 400 pages, I did a trick. I did the largest print I could because this book is about twice the length of some of your kind of entry management books that you're used to. It's about twice the length of some of your kind of engineering management books that you're used to. It's about the same length as Designing Data and Sense of Applications, except Designing Data and Sense of Applications, another popular book,

it does have a lot more formal things. Mine is a bit more on the soft side. In the end, I'm happy with it. It's not a book that you're going to sit down and read the whole thing. It's more of a reference book. It's like you open chapters, you know, stakeholder management, team dynamics. I just became a software engineer. I need to get

things done. There's a lot of getting things done. Like I'm trying to make it really practical. It's pretty much the advice that I gave to people at Uber. So I'm kind of hoping that if you pick up this book, it's a little bit like I was your mentor a little bit. It's not as good as if you have a mentor, like please try to get a mentor. Like that is the best you can do. No book will do justice. But I just hope that, you know, like it gives some structure, it gives some ideas.

And so far, that's what I'm hearing. And by the way, if you're reading this book and you have feedback, you have criticism, also just shoot it over. I don't really plan to write another book anytime soon, but I do plan to improve this further in a few years time. So I'm going to collect whatever might be missing. I'm just hoping that further in a few years time so i'm going to

collect whatever might be missing i'm just hoping that this is going to be on people that's going to reach for it and say like you know what it's giving me a couple of good ideas and i try them out and it just saved me a month or two or even a year of me figuring this stuff out so no new books soon anything else coming down the pipeline or you're working on in addition to the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter? Anything we can look forward to? For now it's a newsletter and I'm just going to chill a little bit

for the next month or two because writing this book and writing a newsletter was a lot of work and I want to get some other versions of the book out. Right now it's only paperback which might be very surprising but because I'm self-publishing doing a Kindle version is a bunch of extra work which I am going to do some other versions of the book out. Right now it's only paperback, which might be very surprising. But because I'm self-publishing,

doing a Kindle version is a bunch of extra work, which I am going to do. And doing an e-book and an audio book is also on my plate. I just wanted to see how the paperback goes. And I'll be honest, one of the reasons I did the paperback first is I'm really hoping that this is a reference book that can be on people's bookshelf.

I know people have a strong preference for Kindle, so that's the next version that's coming. But I've yet to go to someone's house and say like, oh, I really love your Kindle collection. But I have got a lot of times that said like, what is this book? Can I borrow it? Can I take it home? So I'm kind of hoping there's going to be a little bit of this with the book. So I'm just now making sure that there's more printability and in countries where Amazon is printing this right now, but now it's also an Ingram Spark, which means that individual bookstores will be able to order it. I've learned a lot about self-publishing.

I plan to write a post about that, hopefully help other people who are thinking about that. Yeah, that'd be a good one. For sure. Well, speaking of Satya Nadella, whenever he was on that roadshow that you mentioned, back to the opening eye conversation, I noticed a bunch of books behind him. I was like, man, I paused it and I'm like zooming in and looking at all the books i'm like i've read a couple of those and you know one day maybe your book spine will be visible in a future roadshow saving opening eye or a version of it in the future behind the scenes of c of microsoft you know that'd be cool even if not touching it i'll lie it's already a lot of people's bookshelves.

So I was very happy with the reception. And there was a little bit of validating thing about this whole thing because in the end, two publishers, this was different. This was four years ago. I wasn't as well known, I'll just be honest. I did have a blog that people were reading the pragmatic engineering even back then. But two publishers ultimately said, interesting, but it's not for us.

Basically what they said is, we don't believe this will be great business for us because book publishing is about the business. And the third one said, we think this will work, but you need to make a lot of changes to it. And I just stuck to my guns and I wrote the exact same book as I pitched. It's literally the introduction is the same

as I pitched four years ago. I did make some changes, but it was just validating to see that it's doing very, very well, both in terms of sales. It jumped to number one in self-reinjury for a while. I think it still might be there. For six days, it was the most sold book in the Netherlands across Amazon. Amazon Netherlands, like above all, children's book and everything. In the US, it went up to number 30 or number 32 on launch day, which is, of course,

all books sold in the US, which is, again, a big deal. So it was just very nice to see that, yes, there is demand for this. And I have been getting feedback that people do like that. I haven't simplified a lot of things. I haven't made it a bit more verbose, which was a suggestion that a publisher gave me. And again, they had really good intentions. This is what they've seen sell. And since then, I've had one of the biggest publishers in the world come up to Penguin Random House, wanted to talk after a launch, and they asked me, would you be open to writing a book for a bit more generic audience for soft skills? And I said, no, I just want to write for software engineers. And they said, we're not interested in just publishing for software engineers. I know, but I'm only interested

in writing for software engineers, and I'm only interested in writing for stuff that is not a beginner I'm trying to to give stuff that is more advanced and I believe there's a market for this and I think now there is so yeah it's been nice to see that this book that I felt I deeply felt was missing for me it's nice to see that other people feel the same way so it's it's one of those things so I'm really grateful for all the readers who are both buying it because a lot of them just bought it honestly blindly because i guess they knew me for a while but now the the feedback is starting to come in and again i'm looking forward to critical feedback as well like i think that's the thing that i i don't like to feel that i'm done i don't feel like this book i don't think it's done i think there's going to be new versions coming

out of it i'm going to improve, and I want to keep up to date because the industry is changing. This is the first book probably, well, maybe not the first, but the first wider-souled book. AI coding tools are inside of it. I made that change six months before publishing because right now, multiple chapters, how do you grow as a software engineer, what you pair,

you get mentorship, you use AI coding tools as well. If you're not using AI coding tools to improve, you're already left behind. I mentioned things like cloud development environments, which are now spreading in big tech, and some of these other things which are pretty new. And I want to keep the book later on updated as well with the new technologies are spreading pretty decisively.

Developer portals like Backstage, which are common across big tech, again, inside the book. So right now now i'm really proud of it because i think it really describes what is cutting edge across large companies yeah well if anybody can keep it up to date as things change greg you're the man because you are always up to date with what's going on in the industry if you need help with the audiobook i know a guy who's got a good voice. And it's not me. It's Adam.

So maybe we could, that'd be cool. A collab on the, would you narrate a book, Adam? Would you ever do that? Would you? Sure. Would you lend your voice to somebody else's words? Yeah, I would. That's a neat idea.

I could do that any day. Tomorrow. Just an idea. Planting the seed for future collabs. Love it. Anything else, Gergay, that we haven't covered that you want to talk about before we tail out here? I think that's most of it, really. Adam, are you still with us,

or are you just daydreaming right now about... I was thinking about what's left. There's one thing I want to leave for Plus Plus that I think we should at least touch on. It would be nice. That way it's a smaller audience, even. So, hey, if you're not in the change law plus plus arena it is cooler there because you're next to that cold change all metals we say and that's where you want to be that's right so we're gonna ask gary get a question here in a second but for now gary

it's been fun catching up with you it's been fun seeing you again i can't believe it's been a year since the last time we spoke and i I always appreciate your perspective. And I think just your genuine nature to find the truth in what's happening and to share that. I love the way you produce your newsletter. I think you do it very honestly. There's a lot of newsletters out there that have just ulterior motives that just are strictly financial in some cases or audience growth in some cases. And I think that your commitment to being real with your community and the community is refreshing and we like that.

That's why we have you back. So we love talking to you. So thank you for that. Yeah, thanks for that. It's great being on. Until next year. Yeah, until next year. Bye, friends.

If you're wondering what Adam was saving for Plus Plus Ears Only, it's Gergay's recent discovery of a conference that created fake female speakers over the past few years and the resulting fallout after Gergay pulled off the mask. No one would have ever suspected me. That is until you, meddling, gnome-hating, pirate-loving... Yeah, yeah, Shrimpo, we got the picture. So stay tuned if you're a Changelog++ member. If not, well, this is a pretty good time to subscribe.

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That's all for now, but let's talk again real soon. Game on!