Working at a Startup vs in Big Tech
A software engineer I worked in the same team with at Uber has gone back-and-forth between startups and large companies. Willem Spruijt shares the good, the bad and the ugly, about both environments. »
Why are Cloud Development Environments Spiking in Popularity, Now?
Tech companies are building their cloud development environments (CDEs) and dozens of vendors are launching their offerings. But why now? »
Bun: lessons from disrupting a tech ecosystem
If you use JavaScript or TypeScript for backend development, Node is the most popular choice of framework. A new runtime called “Bun” is taking this space by storm. Lessons from this sudden rise. »
How Microsoft does Quality Assurance (QA)
The Redmond Big Tech giant pioneered the SDET role in the 90s. It then retired it in 2014. What happened and why? »
Previous Articles
- How Games Typically Get Built
- A senior engineer/EM job search story
- Are reports of StackOverflow’s fall greatly exaggerated?
- Google Shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links
- What is a Senior Software Engineer at Wise and Amazon?
- Building an an Early Stage Startup: Lessons from Akita Software
- The Pulse: VanMoof files for bankruptcy protection
- Twitter vs Instagram Threads: two different approaches to throttling
- Domain Registrars which Developers Recommend
- Google Domains to shut down
- An explosion in software engineers using AI coding tools?
- Inside Agoda’s Private Cloud - Exclusive
- Should you optimize for all-cash compensation, if possible?
- An educational side project
- Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor: this is how companies respond
- Github Copilot and ChatGPT alternatives
- PagerDuty (and OpsGenie) alternatives
- Datadog’s $65M/year customer mystery solved
- Compensation at Publicly Traded Tech Companies
- Uber’s engineering level changes
- Is Critical Thinking the Most Important Skill for Software Engineers?
- The state of startup funding
- Behind the Scenes with Two New Salary Transparency Websites
- Lyft in Trouble
- Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally?
- Amazon doubling down on RTO (return to office) - exclusive
- The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank
- Big Tech job-switching stats - exclusive
- Why did Google close its coding competitions after 20 years? Exclusive details.
- The job market for new grads: worse than in 2008, but better than 2002
- Apple cracking down to enforce its RTO policy - exclusive
- Apple: The Only Big Tech Giant Going Against the Job Cuts Tide
- What Big Tech layoffs suggest for the industry
- Inside Pollen's Software Engineering Salaries - Exclusive
- CircleCI’s unnoticed holiday security breach
- A Return to the Office (RTO) Wave?
- Twitter’s ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers
- Who is Still Hiring Software Engineers and EMs?
- The Scoop: Tech Layoffs in 2022
- Cruel Changes at Twitter
- The Scoop: Turmoil at Twitter
- The Big Tech Hiring Slowdown Is Here and it will Hurt
- Pollen’s enormous debt left behind: exclusive details
- Is the strategy of joining late-stage startups for the financial upside, a dead end?
- Will Facebook / Meta do engineering layoffs?
- Meta’s historic growth challenge
- Resiliency in Distributed Systems
- What is Data Engineering: Part 2
- Inside Pollen’s Collapse: “$200M Raised” but Staff Unpaid - Exclusive
- What is Data Engineering?
- Inside the Shutdown of Zenly by Snap
- The Scoop: Netflix’s historic introduction of levels for software engineers - exclusive
- I removed all affiliate links from my blog: numbers
- Three years of advertising on my blog: numbers
- Advice for Less Experienced Software Engineers in the Current Tech Market
- Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers
- Companies Using RFCs or Design Docs and Examples of These
- Shipping to Production
- Inside the Layoffs at Klarna
- Job Ads to Hire Software Engineers: My Advice
- Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer: Controversial Advice
- Migrations Done Well: Executing Migrations
- Big Tech and the reality of scaling customer support
- Migrations Done Well: Typical Migration Approaches
- Notable Internal Systems at Amazon
- The Ukraine War - and Its Impact on the Tech Industry
- What TPMs Do and What Software Engineers Can Learn From Them
- Becoming a Better Writer as a Software Engineer
- Coaches and Mentors for Engineering Managers and Engineering Leaders
- Holiday Book Recommendations for Engineering Managers, Software Engineers and Product Managers
- Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team
- Exceptional Off-Cycle Compensation Adjustments for Software Engineers in 2021
- Platform Teams
- How I Motivate Myself to Write
- Incident Review and Postmortem Best Practices
- Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team
- The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 Questions on Engineering Culture
- How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
- The Most Heated Tech Job Market in History: Advice for Software Engineers
- The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech
- My "Investment Mindset"
- Donating My Time to Grow a VC-Funded Company: Why I Quit Mentoring at Plato
- I Want to Hire Someone, But My Team Said No to on the Debrief: Ask the EM
- I Spent $5,000 Advertising My Free Book to iOS and Android Engineers
- Uber's Crazy YOLO App Rewrite, From the Front Seat
- Dependency Injection in iOS and Android Apps
- A Checklist For First-Time Engineering Managers
- EMPOWERED Review: I Needed This Book 4 Years Ago
- The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe
- Preparing for the Systems Design and Coding Interview
- Equity 101 for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups
- Mobile Platform Teams
- Want to Learn about Entrepreneurship, as a Software Engineer? Sell Something Online.
- 10 Engineering Challenges Due to the Nature of Mobile Applications
- Writing a Performance Self Review for Software Engineers - With an Example
- Templates as Inspiration for Software Engineers and Engineering Managers
- Common Performance Review Biases: How to Spot and Counter Them
- System Design Interview Book Review: Finally, a Book for Getting Better at Architecting Systems
- What Becoming an Engineering Manager Feels Like
- What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not
- My Unforgettable Uber Ride
- Ask the EM: How Can I work Better with My Product Manager, as an Engineering Lead?
- Advice to Myself When Starting Out as a Software Developer
- Data Structures & Algorithms I Used Working at Tech Companies
- Can You Really Measure Individual Developer Productivity? - Ask the EM
- The Cheetah Software Engineer
- Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager: My Book Review and Notes
- Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software
- Surprising Things About Working at Well-Known Tech Unicorns
- I Feel Stuck as a Staff Engineer, Wanting to Move Into an EM Role - Ask the EM
- A Software Engineering Culture Test
- Paper debugging
- Tech Debt and the Pragmatic Middle Ground
- The Pyramid of Unit Testing Benefits
- I'm Acting as The Team's Lead, But I'm Not Actually One - Ask the EM
- Refactoring Typescript: My Book Review
- How Can I Prepare to Eventually Move into Engineering Management? - Ask the EM
- How to Lead a Project - as a Software Engineer
- Performance Reviews for Software Developers – How I Do Them In a (Hopefully) Fair Way
- The 2010s in Software Development
- Distributed systems learnings in 2019
- Readable Code
- I'm Writing a Book on Growing as a Software Developer
- Don't Work Alone When You're a New or Junior Engineer
- An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader
- A Philosophy of Software Design: My Take (and a Book Review)
- Working at Silicon Valley Companies - in Europe
- Stretching, Executing, Coasting - and Pacing Yourself to Avoid Burnout
- Talk First, Code Later
- Seniority for Software Engineers: a Tech Talk
- Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects
- Stop Calling it Bad Code
- Software Developer Promotions: Advice to Get to That Next Level
- Software Architecture is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design is Underrated
- Growth hacks: coffee with an experienced engineer you don’t know
- The Product-Minded Software Engineer
- Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well
- An Elegant Puzzle Book Review: an Overdue Read for Software Engineering Leads
- Operating a Large, Distributed System in a Reliable Way: Practices I Learned
- Good Code Reviews, Better Code Reviews
- Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well
- Pull request best practices
- Scaling Engineering Teams via RFCs: Writing Things Down
- Efficient Software Project Management at its Roots
- Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system
- Seven things that helped me move into engineering management
- Things I've learned transitioning from engineer to engineering manager
- Transitioning From Objective C to Swift in 4 Steps - Without Rewriting The Existing Code
- My Code Ended Up Running an Oil Rig. These are the 5 Things I Learned.
- What Agile Really Means
- A Comment Is An Invitation For Refactoring
- The Software Development Dilemma: Move Fast without Breaking Things?
- Swift: The Only Modern Language without Mocking Frameworks
- Getting Into the Zone with a Single Pomodoro
- From Software Developer to Software Engineer