This week we’re back talking to Gergely Orosz — this time not quite about the insane tech hiring market, but more so the flip side, the 180, the not so good tech hiring market, the layoff market and what you can expect. There’s a lot of FUD out there, so hopefully this show gives you a lens into what’s really going on, and what to really expect. Maybe more so, how to keep your job or find a new job. We come to this topic with great compassion and great understanding, so please…there is a community here for you. There’s a lot of people in our Slack. Call it your home, it’s free to join and everyone is welcome.

Gergely Orosz did an excellent job detailing the ins & outs of Atlassian’s epic outage:

Hundreds of companies have no access to JIRA, Confluence and OpsGenie. What can engineering teams learn from the poor handling of this outage?

The TL;DR on the cause of the outage is a script that was supposed to “mark for deletion” some records also had “permanently delete” functionality and was run against a wrong list of IDs, improperly deleting 400 of their customers. Oh, and their backup restore process is really good at doing all customers, but not a subset. Ruh roh!

Lots to learn here, and Gergely puts a fine point on the biggest takeaways. A must-read!

This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring market.

Gergely Orosz joined Adam for a conversation about his journey as a software engineer. Gergely recently stepped down from his role as Engineering Manager at Uber to pursue his next big thing. But, that next big thing isn’t quite clear to him yet. So, in the meantime, he has been using this break to write a few books and blog more so he can share what he’s learned along the way. He’s also validating some startup ideas he has on platform engineering. His first book is available to read now — it’s called The Tech Resume Inside Out and offers a practical guide to writing a tech resume written by the people who do the resume screening. Both topics gave us quite a bit to talk about.

Gergely Orosz shared advice that he’d give to himself 10 years ago. It’s interesting how hindsight is always 20/20…it’s easier to connect the dots looking back vs looking forward.

As I look back to over a decade ago, there are a few things I wish I’d started doing sooner. Habits that could have helped made me grow faster and in a more focused way. This is the advice I’d give my younger self, who has just landed their first professional software engineering job.

1. Take the time to read two books per year on software engineering … Every time I took the time to slowly and thoroughly read a recommended book on software engineering, I leveled up. By properly reading, I mean taking notes, talking chapters through with others, doodle diagrams, trying out, going back, and re-reading…

If you are a leader or someone aspiring to lead, consider this approach to engineering management.

This post is a summary of the approach and tools I’ve used to build an engineering team, where everyone is a leader - including sharing of the project management expectations Google Docs guide that my team uses. It’s also a reflection on the pain points that came with this approach. I can’t advocate for how universally this approach could work. However, based on my results, it is something I suggest engineering leaders - especially frontline managers - consider as an option.

What, exactly, is mentoring? How does it work? Better yet, how does it work well? In this post Gergely Orosz, Engineering Manager at Uber, shares his perspective and the practices he’s seen work well.

Mentorship has been the best things that’s sped up my growth and others engineers around me. This post discusses mentorship practices that work well engineer-to-engineer. The practices come from my own experience, observations I’ve made people mentoring each other and from conversations I’ve had with half a dozen mentors in my network and on Coding Coach.

Being able to communicate and write well often plays out to being a huge asset in a career. But how does that works for software engineers? Gergely Orosz writes on his personal blog:

For software engineers, writing becomes the tool to reach, converse with and influence engineers and teams outside their immediate peers. Writing becomes essential to make thoughts, tradeoffs and decisions durable. Writing things downs makes these thoughts available for a wide range of people to read.