Gergely Orosz
Author, The Pragmatic Engineer. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorengineeranalyst@GergelyOrosz ↗LinkedIn ↗pragmaticengineer.com ↗
Gergely Orosz runs The Pragmatic Engineer, a leading technology publication on Substack covering software engineering practices, industry trends, and tech careers. Prior to writing full-time, he worked as a software developer at Skype and an engineering manager at Uber, and he authored The Software Engineer's Guidebook.
Everything Gergely Orosz said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Orosz earns more from his newsletter than his $330,000 Uber peak
“Now I am making more in compensation that I made at Uber and The difference is that now my compensation, well, my earnings are keep going up as long as the newsletter is growing.”
Orosz: European engineers undervalue equity because Europe lacks startup success stories
“European software engineers will not value stock as much because they just haven't seen success stories.”
Orosz: Code comments mean the code should be refactored and deleted
“If there's a comment to the code, that means that comments should be deleted and you should just refactor the whole thing.”
Orosz: Having big tech employer pedigree drives audience attention for writers
“So there's, especially these days, like a lot, people would not pay nearly as much attention to me if I worked at, you know, small parts limited.”
Orosz: High-effort newsletter articles create immediate annual revenue raises
“I had a spreadsheet that I maintained for the first year of the publication where I listed for every article, how much did my annual revenue go up a week later? So kind of tracking, like, what was the impact? And the crazy thing was that you know, when I wrote…”
Orosz: Uber's overinvestment in custom internal tools birthed alumni startups
“Uber has invested silly amounts of money to build everything custom internally, like everything that you can think of. Our build system is custom, our experimentation system, our container, you know, the way we kind of automatically set that up a lot of the en…”
Orosz: Uber laid off my team members without informing me beforehand
“Uber did layoffs in April and it was really stressful. So it was the first time I didn't lay anyone off, but people on my team were laid off. I wasn't told who's going to be laid up.”
Orosz: Uber engineering middle managers lacked authority and team budgets
“What no one told me is, yes, I was a manager, but I was a middle manager. I didn't have too much authority. I didn't even have a budget for my team. Like, you know, someone was underpaid and I couldn't do anything except complain for HR for six months and hope…”
Orosz: External publisher deadlines are the easiest way to finish books
“If you want to write a book, the easiest way is go to a publisher and sign a contract, not because of the money. In software engineering, you're not going to get much, like, 5000 dollars or something like that. That's what I was offered initially, but it's the…”
Orosz: Entrepreneurs must create artificial constraints to maintain productivity
“If you put in ways that you have to do certain things, you know, put in constraints for the things that you need to do, and then you're going to do that. Without that, when you're on your own, when you're an entrepreneur, I was a great, like, I think I was a r…”
Orosz: Solo newsletters cannot achieve traditional exits without building an organization
“From what we're doing, It's really tied to us. So however much or little my newsletter will make, you know, it'll have a value, let's say four or five times the annual revenue as a business, but you cannot really sell it like that and you cannot really walk aw…”
Orosz: Professionals should set controllable input goals, not outcome targets
“One is the goal, you know, people will set this goal. I want to be promoted the next thing, or I want to lead this big project. And those are bad goals because it's not in your control. So setting similar, setting a goal that I want to have a successful newsle…”
Orosz: In 2016, candidates routinely rejected Google and Facebook for Uber
“When I went to Uber in 2016, it was one of the highest regarded places back in 2016 and 20 17. It was the other way around, but back in 2016, people were turning out Facebook and Google offers to go at Uber, which we all thought would change the world.”
Orosz: Writing faces less competition than YouTube as creators shift to video
“These days, fewer people write because I think a lot of people find it hard and more people will do videos. And you can take advantage of some of these shifts, you know, like which might be good or bad. So if you're gonna be a really well-known person on YouTu…”
Orosz: London was Europe's top tech hub before Brexit
“And I moved up to London, which, you know, like in Europe, I kind of feel it's like the New York of Europe or even the Silicon Valley back in the day, back before Brexit, it was the biggest tech hub.”
Orosz: Pragmatic Engineer reached 189K subscribers, adding 80K in 90 days
“Well, just today I checked and it said 189,000 Subscribers. It's the past, I think the past 90 days has been growing with 80,000 subscribers. So it's just, it's almost a thousand people per day”
Orosz: Peak total compensation at Uber in Europe was $330,000
“In my best year at Uber, I made about like 320 or 330,000 dollars in total compensation. This was after Uber went public. So it's, it includes the stock, the base salary, the bonus, which was very, very good in Europe.”
Orosz made $100,000 in one year self-publishing tech books
“This book, Building Mobile Apps at Scale, another book that I published about tech resumes. I just wrote these in a few months. They started making money. They made about a 100,000 dollars in the first year.”
Orosz: Pragmatic Engineer newsletter posts double as serialized book chapters
“I had the sneaky idea. Of, hey, what if I wrote this book where I kind of write some posts that will be part of the book, and then the book will just kind of come together partially. And I, I've kind of been doing that. I haven't been telling people, but some …”
Orosz: Pragmatic Engineer gained 1,000 paid subscribers in its first six weeks
“I announced my newsletter. I told people I'm gonna go full-time on this. I had maybe 10,000 Twitter followers and I don't know, like maybe a thousand on LinkedIn or something like that. And people started signing up the next day. I had a hundred subscribers in…”
The other half of the tape: Gergely Orosz's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ebi Atawodi 6
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 6
2023 6 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Gergely's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Author, The Pragmatic Engineer | 1 | 21 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |