The state of the 2023 tech market

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. Fastly .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, Gerge. 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 now it's starting. 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 titling, you know.

The nerds loved it, yes. Well, we negated that sucker. It worked out well. What kind of operator should we have? Is it a not 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 changed. 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 a 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 are 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 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 helps them with database schema, it helps them with all these unique things that just was not there last year really, you know, 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, and this is whatever is 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, you know, 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, and 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, et cetera, 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, you know, like these amazing positions where, which pay very well and generate a lot of value, but here I am sitting, I got frustrated with my utility company, for example, how just awkward it is to pay, or public transport, again, like 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, making our work conditions improve, composition 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 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 an 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, you know, 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 you know, 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, right, like customer support, like every single company, customer support teams have been going down in headcount as software engineers, you know, 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, like we were very proud of this and it was cost saving, and now is the first time where software engineers are asking like, am I going to 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 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 like let's stick to the web, these website builders point and click, because that's a great example, I think that's been really commoditized, if you want to do a 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 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, oh yeah it's not going anywhere, 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, you know, 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 a thousand dollars, and I asked like a thousand dollars, like why a thousand dollars, like well ten dollars for the hammer, and 990 for knowing where to hit it, I think that's gonna, what's gonna be software engineers, don't forget that with all this AI stuff, software is gonna be way more complicated, AI will generate more complicated software, so it's gonna be harder to know what is going wrong, I've noticed as well when I'm using chat GPT, 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 gonna be at a job is not true, what is true is there will be the kind of the people who used to have a job, let's say from a boot camp, from you know 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 gonna go back to what every other craft has, you will need to study several years, right, 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 gonna 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 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 ChatGBT 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. That is a great time. If he 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 the public are doing, their focus is not really anymore the public side, 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 ChatGBT and Claude, 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 ChatGBT is amazing at giving coding suggestion because they've been trained on the 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, so could we go back to experts exchange, do you remember what was before experts exchange, sorry it was experts 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, but I'm saying this because I'm now starting to see some things going a little bit circular, one good example going back, because we're now back to how do you incentivize people, 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 find 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 next like six months, but I think the next like five years it'll be, it'll alter drastically how much people are willing to just, you know, 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 you, how do you track the incentive, well if the AI can do it, 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 we'll get to a place and future Adam or somebody out there come back to this because 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 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 Gergae

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, 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 know like looking back is 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

serverless. So you're on the front lines tell me what you're here 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 see 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 life cycle 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 are you know you're deploying all the time and there is a specific you know part when you just like building out the application from zero to one and then you push the application into production and then they 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 life cycle so when you think about what a modern deployed 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're on 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 neon is charging full speed into participating in the software development life cycle world what that looks like is neon supports branches so that's the enabling feature git supports branches neon supports branches internally because we built neon we built our you know 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 a hundred 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 this data or at least schema backing 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 know 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 open ai right i was hoping you're gonna say that they're the right now uh the most hyped ai company they're also the one that objectively is shipping the most visible things and and they have the most users they pass 100 million weekly users in less than a year which had gpt and yet the company almost was in turmoil and maybe uh 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 open ai wants to align ai make 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 like there's a question of like what does the 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 and that's gonna 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 i was initially just following along because like everyone i i just couldn't really believe what was happening it was just so shocking that i had literally finished an article talking with uh one of the head of engineer one of the two head of engineering as chat gpt evan rafka who was one of the first engineers on chat gpt three years ago he joined this small team called applied there were six people in open ai so open ai back then in 2020 it was about 150 people and 144 of them were research people they were just building these really cool you know models that would eventually become chat gpt and they hired a team to turn this into applied and he was one of the six first six people first engineering manager in three years they grew to 150 people and only one year ago they decided to launch chat gpt so they're building some you know cool stuff on the side which was very surprising to me and they apparently built chat gpt in a few weeks they launched it they became very successful they could barely keep up with the man and they kept scaling up and one of their problems that they had which we didn't write about but we might have a follow -up they were short on gpu's even though they had all the access to microsoft they were short on gpu's 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 open ai is i talked with the software engineer and then evan is a software engineer he's telling me that he told me like look like this whole chat gpt it's kind of a black box that predicts things really well and it we know it works well and our job is to productionize it 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 again they had engineers with 10 plus years 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 open ai would have never been as successful if they did not have 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 is moving so fast and then as i published it their ceo was fired even though the company is doing extremely well there yeah it seems no one can stop and i made this joke on social media that we were wondering who could stop open ai and it themselves they're it felt from the outside they were sabotaging themselves as i was thinking back like when was the last time we've seen such a shocking ceo firing because you know travis calendar for example was fired from uber but it was not really unexpected because the company was struggling right but when you see a company doing amazingly well just going up up up and they're about to close this 86 billion around and i think everyone expecting that they're on the way to become a thriller in our 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 know 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 at the board surprisingly going quiet my biggest surprise from the whole saga was that sam was fired friday how satchel adela was the one he felt like he was a spokesperson for open ai he sprung into action he sprung into action he started to communicate what was happening at open ai even though like open ai was arguably like 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 open ai but apparently they opened so my biggest surprise was how open ai 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 open ai 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 yeah it was really fascinating and i think this whole event just broke the image of open ai being this unbeatable company for example you know now i think a lot of people are looking at that and traffic their models are doing pretty well they just didn't have this trauma you know they could everyone could my biggest takeaway is i feel this field is super volatile i think until now what we've seen is they move these companies move really fast and we were wondering how can they move this fast but you know they actually don't have it all figured out

it's not sustainable yeah

it's not sustainable they won't need to slow down to get stability and or they keep rushing and they'll be extremely unstable just like open ai is right now so i 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 percent 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 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 up there there's too many questions with the leadership right now and how stable their leadership really is and their vision yeah 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 uh 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 so we read that such you never 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 the view of the inside of the leadership at open ai and the disagreements and just the weirdness of their board and their company structure or whatever it is the entity i guess in a sense i like it because it's going to provide more diversity in the space like we're going to take other companies more seriously where it just felt like open ai had such a huge lead and just continue to like you said just launch and improve and like every time you turn around chat cpt was better and they were integrating other people's stuff it looked like yeah it felt like super human so even when i talk with the with even like it just seemed they did everything perfectly or even better and just made no mistakes which again were 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 like of course you know again they came up with a really good apply but i think because of this again if chat gpt is a little bit better or even a lot better than all the other models the others are going to catch up like we know they're it's the same people working there same faults same kind of approaches what we've seen as open ai 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 antropic 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 that 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 claud 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 there's not only one player in this space and antropic is very tempting because they're also independent right they're not like google has barge and amp yeah what's their story i don't know much about them their story is that some open ai employees were actually unhappy with how decisions were made at open ai 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 open ai 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 even bigger so i hope open ai antropic and other startups that come and fill the space they will succeed but what i feel is these companies have open ai has rapidly gone through the startup phase and how they're almost big tech they now rapidly have to mature which is going to be painful because like you know i i worked at a company that went through like this maturing at uber it's not as fun like 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 u .s a few weeks ago and i caught up with a friend who works at nvidia and he was telling me that like jensen people adore him like the people they don't have to go into the office but when jensen goes in all hands and he speaks on the all hands he got to freestyle 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'm planning to learn on more and i have some friends who used to work at google and and other places now at nvidia and they're very happy and you know 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 to benefit from it all right i mean they get to get their ei and keep it too i mean they have the all the gps 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 to investor pressure to fire 10 or whatever to show to investors that were firing that were 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 it since jensen was there they haven't fired and he's been very clear about this so he's been holding his bag against investors and also they're the only company that i know of big tech apparently their model is unofficial model 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 like i 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 just honest and and down to earth normal yeah he doesn't sound like business which again it's probably such an adela is is also very relatable hey he's in a great job at microsoft but it does fill me with some hope that we're we're seeing some of the kind of human ceos succeed as opposed to the ones that are just like you know doing death marches or or sticking a vision and not caring about anyone else right the evil villains what's

up friends i'm here with one of our good friends for ross a book a dj for ross is the founder and ceo of socket you can find them at socket .dev

secure your supply chain ship with confidence but for ross 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 network uh you know meaning it's gonna take your your api keys your tokens like that would be bad uh the unfortunate thing is that today most developers who are choosing packages and 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 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 and kinds of malware and uh vulnerabilities and 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 uh we're you know our whole team is made up of developers and uh so it's super developer friendly we got tired of using security tools that send a ton of alerts and we're hard to configure and and 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 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 all right so we help you make better decisions about dependencies that you're using directly in the pull request workflow directly 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

it's 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

what do you mention facebook hiring are you paying attention to you know the uptick or neutral hiring processes of i suppose big tech at large but you know something that gives us the to 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 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 so i think i talk with some people google where they're 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 a like i'm not hearing places that don't do back fills and these companies typically large tech companies in a normal year they would lose 10 of their head count or eight percent in terms of people leaving and back filling it seems this is a bit lower right now but still like for these companies to hire even five percent of a you know 100 ,000 person company let's say there's 50 ,000 people working in software engineers at a company like i'm just guessing five percent of that would be it's in the thousands so i hear a lot of back filling and open positions for more experienced engineers two areas that seem to be hiring a lot less the engineering leadership and during management most companies are reducing management layers so there's less space for senior managers directors and i'm hearing a lot of directors people 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 that interest of hiring will be back at big tech last year most 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 please take 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 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 like hey how are you doing what are your friends up to and this interest i'd like well like a lot of my friends who didn't get like the interest 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 graduates 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 maybe 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 these are they're not working as hard they're kind of you know more kickback you ask a lot of young kids these days they want to be influencers right like that's something that's like 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 enough so like i think obviously this thing just like it's funny because a lot of people like aspire young 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 if i you're an influencer well i mean i could be labeled that but i 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 i think of myself as just like the two of you you know like i run a business which happens to have a newsletter component but i think of it as education and and keeping up with the industry i feel there 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 this path is open to more people i think is a lot harder than you think and my honest view is i think it's a terrible thing to only aim for having these you know 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 small business or something that they do that is generating some 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 you know they shoot stuff for clients and they often record how they do what year 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 i try to do like i have a lot of followers in different platforms especially twitter and linkedin these text -based ones but like 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 like you know get input i sometimes share drafts i don't really care if tomorrow you know like the algorithm like deprioritizes my views or enrolled in twitter ad revenue because i wanted to see like how much i i can make but i don't care if it's zero or not so it's just a nice bonus for me but it's not my 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 what do you think about gen z where you know the graduating generation is either gen z or maybe the one after growing up with iphones and she was saying i love them like it's amazing like they're just so engaged they come into the workplace and i think in software engineer we product managers especially she's more of a product focus engineering manager there's always a problem if you hire a software engineer and you really want to get them interested in product like you know talk to customers understand them and she's like with this generation you don't have that like 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 uh it's like 6 p .m i need to meet up with friends goodbye yeah i've done all my work like this is 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 face time and also they just i have some friends in europe uh europe is a little sore paced and a lot of companies they're complaining that they're quitting because they're bored and they don't see advancement in 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 uh coming into the workforce

saying i try the app i compare 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 where i consider it i have a more clearer understanding of directions i should go or whatnot that also happens with wise parenting and involved parents you know 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 a grass business called bad because it was ben adam and donald and so it was ba 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 like 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 like we talked about ai it's a really interesting question like we now have people coming into the workforce who are you out of college or maybe with self -taught who is the biggest beneficiary of ai tools let's just take a co -pilot and alternatives your source graph has kodi there's tab 9 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 a 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 like i i haven't developed anything in typescript for i haven't really touched it for much but i built a website on site and i just use chat gpt 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 jungle or one of them he's a very well -known software engineer he has got it into ai and uh using chat gpt and doing a lot of cool stuff in the space and he actually said that like 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 these histologies so senior engineers who master ai tools will be 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 like 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 like 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 of how you can be more efficient whereas 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 gonna like very quickly put together build mock okay they'll make mistakes but they're gonna learn and again don't forget that this generation is they're sharp they contact switch and they're also thinking in terms of problems product problems not necessarily software engineer problems and they want to solve for it now i'm afraid that they're gonna take our jobs you know heck with the ai the kids the kids are gonna come take our jobs at them isn't that how it works you know anyways that's how it should work yes that is how it works well 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's it for and how long did it take you to write it yeah so title is software engineers guidebook and this was the book that i had been writing for a very long time it was a book that i 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 sky scanner and then a senior engineer at uber so there's like different levels and at uber i was a manager and i helped people get promoted to the senior level staff engineering levels and so on on my team and i just learned a bunch of stuff the hard way for example promotions work what the expectations are at a company like uber and uber has similar expectations to the likes like google etc and i was just mentoring people a lot on how to become better software engineers and how to go for example from 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 we 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 point time report 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 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 with 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 had sometimes had lunches with developers they were just really confused on what it means to be a senior i got into argument with a person who said like no mentoring is it shouldn't be part of a seniors what a senior does i'm like yes it does like 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 from 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 they're past the senior level it's not really for people who have a really good mentor who can navigate them on you know 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 like 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 and 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 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 that you should just know about that again if you worked at a large company that has these it's gonna be like yeah i know all 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 how 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 as i was writing this book it took four years to write i started in 2019 at uber even before we had our first changelog recording i left uber in 2020 i wanted to finish it but it took a bit 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 on for example i did a deep dive in facebook's engineering culture and amazon's engineering culture but i started to see these gaps that okay this book should cover this and this and this as well so in the end it's uh 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 bread crumbs on like here's things that you can go into i tried to go over everything that is relevant for software engineer and so far the 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 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 change for 20 years working at consultancies or can i would say mid -level tech companies they said oh my gosh like i would have needed this like 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 books 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 what does it mean to work with them do they do you have to have a good relationship with them and i think what you've done is kind of normalized what is the expectation of 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 alive 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 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 gonna 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 morgan which was a you know like a bank but it was not a tech company but it was a more prestigious company it was at skype which was somewhat of a late -day startup at the time and then it became microsoft i went to sky scanner which was a 700 scale off the european scale up and then i worked at uber which was just very high growth at the time and it was a true silicon valley company when 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 hey 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 mean 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 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 like here's a sub that you should showcase your work and then some of these tips and so for example with stakeholder management again i work with stakeholder for many years especially as a manager and i just saw what the great engineers did and so i'm trying to give the vocabulary and a structure of how you can think you don't need to follow 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 gonna explain to you and most people like get around to this after a while you ask about their challenges like you just do some small talk with them like hey do you have any kids et cetera 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 gonna be way more efficient a tip that for example i learned very late is asking them to shadow on a meeting like literally the legal team you would ask like they're having a meeting like as a software you kind of go into your meeting and just sit in the corner see what you guys are talking about and on the legal meeting it makes no sense because you're a software engineer but when you're at the staff level you need to understand the business this is one of the best ways you can do it again most people including staff level ventures just don't do it and if you do it you're gonna be way more efficient so uh tanya 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 tried to kind of break it down of what everything i felt was intimidating or i didn't understand i 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 like this book is finished yeah so here's the thing i self -published i originally wanted to write for the publisher i had some ideas i had some uh i really hoped that i will 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 uh 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 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 what 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 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 get myself a deadline which is what the publisher would give you

yeah

at the end of the deadline i have 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 injury management books that you're used to it's it's about the same length of designing data intensive 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 gonna sit down and read the whole thing it's it's more 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 like it 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 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 a 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 this is going to be on people that's going to reach for it and say like you know what it's given 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 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 uh look forward to for now as a newsletter and i'm just gonna chill a little bit for the next like month or two because writing this book and writing a newsletter was a lot of work and i want to get some uh other versions of the book out right now it's only paperback which might be very surprising but because i saw publishing doing a kindle version is a bunch of extra work which i am going to do and doing an ebook and an audiobook 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 i said like what is this book can i borrow it i can i take it home so i'm kind of hoping there's going to be a little bit of of this with the book so i'm just 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 road show that you mentioned back to the opening eye conversation i noticed a bunch of books behind him and 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

road show saving opening eye or a version of it in the future behind the scenes of sea of microsoft you know that'd

be cool even

if not satya nadella it's already a lot of people's bookshelves so i i was very happy with the reception and you know the there was a little bit of validating thing about this whole thing because in the end i two publishers this was different this was four years ago i i wasn't as well known i'll just be honest i did have a blog that was people were reading the pragmatic injury even back then but two publishers ultimately said like 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 would 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 you know 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 in the u .s it went up to number 30 or number 32 on launch day which is across all books sold in the u .s 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 it i haven't simplified a lot of things i haven't made it a bit more verbose which was 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 the biggest publisher 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 i know but like 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 really 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 it and i want to keep up to date with because the industry is changing this is the first book probably well maybe not the first but the first wider sold book ai coding tools are inside of it like i made that change six months before publishing because like right now in multiple chapters how do you grow as a software engineer what you pair you know 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 the new technologies are spreading pretty decisively developer portals like backstage which are common across big tech again inside the book so i'm right 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 gergay 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 uh that'd be cool a collab on the on would you narrate a book adam would you ever do that would you uh 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 serious really adam are you still with us are you just daydreaming right now about uh 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 just to that way it's a smaller audience even so hey if you're not in the changelog plus

plus arena it is cooler there because you're next to that cold change all metal as we say and that's where you want to be that's right so we're gonna ask gary 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 always appreciate your perspective and i i think just your your genuine nature to find the truth in what's happening and just 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 who have just ulterior motives that just are strictly financial in some cases or audience growth in some cases and i think that uh your commitment to being real with your community and the community is refreshing we like that that's why we have you back absolutely 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 is 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 yes repo we got the picture so

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thanks again to our partners fastly .com fly .io and typesense .org and to our beat freaking residents breakmaster cylinder next week on the changelog news on monday drew devault from source hut on wednesday and we're playing round two of the award -worthy how to find game on friday that's all for now but let's talk again real soon