Articles by Gergely Orosz
Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCsAn Uber engineer shares their lightweight Request For Comments (RFC) process that has provided visibility, helped standardize tech and architecture choices, and successfully scaled to thousands of engineers.
- Things I've learned transitioning from engineer to engineering manager
Gergely summarizes what worked well for him as he transitioned from senior engineer to engineering manager: the importance of mentors, understanding the new role's priorities, deciding on a time and task management strategy, goal-setting, and taking the time to learn, experiment and reflect.
- Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well
Gergely discusses mentorship practices that work well engineer-to-engineer, guidance on being an effective mentor, and suggestions for finding mentors.
- The Product-Minded Software Engineer
Gergely summarizes 9 traits he's observed in product-minded engineers, and tips for any engineer to become more product-minded. Product-minded engineers have a deep interest in the product itself, understand why decisions are made, and enjoy being involved in making product decisions. They are proactive with product ideas/opinions, have an interest in the business, user behavior, and data on this, possess curiosity and a keen interest in "why?", have strong communication skills and relationships with non-engineers, and offer product/engineering tradeoffs upfront. Product-minded engineers are often key contributors to user-facing features and become team leads.
- Tech Debt
Gergely explains how to become aware of technical debt, how to keep tech debt to a minimum, and what is the right amount of tech debt to keep.
- How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
Gergely covers: • Project management approaches across the industry. An overview of a survey with over 100 companies represented, plus key takeaways. • Project management at Big Tech. How are these done? How does the organizational setup of Big Tech influence how projects are executed? • The lack of Scrum at Big Tech. Why is the popular framework missing from most of Big Tech, and are there takeaways for companies operating outside this model? • How should you run projects in your team? I’ll share my personal take.
- How I Do (Hopefully) Fair Performance Reviews for Software Developers
Gergely summarizes his approach to performance reviews, with templates, and covers: • Prerequisites for fair perf reviews: levels, competencies, expectations • Bad performance reviews • Three observations about perf reviews at tech companies • How I do performance reviews: preparation, writing the review, removing bias & delivering it • Example performance reviews - and templates
- Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects
Gergely discusses the importance of good communication in the case of missed estimates, and the value of estimates and deadlines in encouraging focus and reflection.