Gergely Orosz

I don't talk about too about the year I worked at JP Morgan. The people were nice, the money really good, but the workplace & culture really drained me down. 

The culture was... not like a software engineering culture. When I moved to Skype, the change was an instant "relief".

At JPM, everything just felt complacent.

People were okay having meetings on meetings for meetings. I had to ask permission to install tools to make me/the team more productive: and most were rejected. Having good relationship with traders was more important than shipping stuff.

Talking with people who did brief (similarly 1 year or so) stints at these banks, before moving back to "tech-first" companies.

They're telling me, unfortunately, not much has changed, 10 years later.

"Culture and bureaucracy made speed and innovation difficult" sums it up.

At JPM, I got drained by the end of the day. I recharged my batteries by building "real" software with side projects t home. I build most my Windows Phone apps this time. They were far more fun.

It just felt no one but me had the least interest to move fast, with good quality.

The one very imporant thing I learned while working at JP Morgan was that every few months you should ask yourself:

- Does my work give me energy?
- Do I feel challenged day to day?
- Am I learning?

If the answer is no: leave for more challenges. There are plenty out there.

Writing @Pragmatic_Eng & @EngGuidebook. Advisor @mobile__dev. Uber & Skype alumni. Career opportunities for software engineers & EMs: https://t.co/MJ0eAtlaS1

Index Ventures

"What equity is good allocation if I'm joining an European startup?"

A hard question to answer, as so much of EU startups are behind US allocation. But I've found an excellent resource by @IndexVentures: a free, online book for stock options for EU entrepreneurs. It's AMAZING. https://t.co/xsRGDwI8Fb

Seed (less than 10 engineers) for senior engineers at around $6M valuation: around 1%. The higher the valuation & the salary, the lower the ownership, of course. US benchmarks - with higher salaries - below. 
https://t.co/H6eCDNj0G8 https://t.co/FTRuWAshks

At Series A, it's no longer about %, except for execs at this point (see image #1).

At Series A, a fair equity for a senior engineer is around 50% of your base salary. Note that at Series A, your base salary should be the market salary.

Details: https://t.co/Vh58H7J9e5 https://t.co/6h0JDc2fTn

Post-Series A (Series B, C, D, E, F, H...) the grants become more and more competing with the public tech company compensation. Public "Tier 3" companies will allocate $20-100K/year for senior engineers on top of base salary (details: https://t.co/BHWctPBJLE)

Read the whole handbook here: https://t.co/MD5Dta3VSm

It's a must-read for any EU founder, and if you're getting an offer from an EU startup with worse stock options, it's worth forwarding to them. Big up @IndexVentures for this!

I have talked with multiple people working at startups with some form version of holocracy in place (no managers, basically delegating management responsibilities to all employees on some rotational basis). 

The irony is they all have problems managers would have solved already.

Typical problems:
1. Hidden hierarchies that are usually tenure based (it’s dangerous to give a low performance review to an old-timer)
2. Oldtimers feeling stuck in their career path
3. “I keep getting amazing performance reviews, whatever I do” - form an early employee (see #1)

4. Decision paralysis for most org-related changes
5. Inability to hire senior talent from the outside - and rightfully so. Most seniors run from self-governing places
6. Sr engineers are almost always in the trap of the premature senior - via @mipsytipsy https://t.co/UoA1s7odYa

7. Performance reviews gamified by old-timers (“you help me, I help you”), and at the same time a huge waste of every employee’s time

8. Either firing good performers early (thanks to no real managers/good feedback & perf reviews biasing for tenure) or poor performers too late

Almost all these startups have founders who have not been managers before & have the theory “a bad manager can destroy a team. Let’s solve for that.”

Instead of the occasional bad -but accountable - manager, you now *only* have bad/inexperienced/untrained/unaccountable managers.

Talking with director-level folks at big tech companies, I'm gathering "very flexible remote" for tech folks is here to stay even at these places. A few quotes (thread):

"People are nervous about going back to the office. Hiring is slow. We don't want to make them more nervous."

"We're reading the situation with the goal of not losing our talent and also hiring great talent. We need to be very flexible to do so."

"People want to hear about our remote work policy... as long as it confirms they can keep doing what they've been doing the past year."

"We have had our office open and told people they are welcome to come in whenever they want to... for a few people, this was important. I'd say it's 10% of the population who want to come to the office though, the rest are happy to do it very rarely or never."

"We're also looking out to what competing companies will do as next. We can't have a more strict policy than them: otherwise we'll lose great people."

"It's not just remote, but the market moving up and is very hot. We are updating compensation to hold on to senior+ talent."

"Honestly, right now corporate is saying it will be an expectation to come to the office every now and then. I expect this will fade over 6 months. The office will be there for whoever wants to use it: that's about it."

Phrased I never heard before I started working at a large company (thread).

1:1 - a meeting with two people: you’re on of them. Also refers to regular meetings with your manager.

All-hands: company-wide meeting.

Jam: fancy for meeting. Usually more on the brainstorming side.

Perf: performance review. Usually happens every 6 or 12 months.

H1/H2: first/second half of the year. Usually Jan-June. But for companies with different financial year like Microsoft, it can mean Sep-Mar.

Q1-Q4: same, but quarters. Used a lot in publicly traded companies.

Escalate: get higher ups involved to move things along. Usually cc’ing a manager.

cc: add someone on the “cc” of an email. You’ll see LOT of email at big companies.

tl;dr - “too long, didn’t read.” Used as a heads up that you’ll give a 1-2 sentence summary upfront.

OO / OOTO: out of the office. They’re not around for whatever reason. Might or might not be PTO.

PTO: paid time off/on vacation. Don’t expect a reply till they’re back. Escalate if you really need something.

RSVP: indicate if you attend or not. Usually for company/team events.

OKR, KPI: product/team/company-related objectives and measurements to track progress.

Team/company vision: a northstar of where we’re going

Northstar: the direction/goal we’re marching towards

Team/company mission: kind of like vision, but shorter term, and more concrete

Align: get people and teams on the same page.

Influence: convince people of your ideas when you’re not their manager (you don’t have autorit). Essential skill over time.

Politics: many ppl trying to influence each other, some with more success. Usually used in negative context.

EOY: end of (company financial) year. EOY review, EOY perf, EOY party.

EOM: end of message. Weird, but I saw this as well.

This is the EOM. What phrases did I leave off you learned at large companies?

Have you ever wanted to really work on a well-known  product/team at a specific tech company? 

Have you noticed how some people spend 5-10-15+ years at the same companies?

The two are connected. Let me tell you why & why internal transfers become so advantageous at many places.

Most tech companies have a liberal internal transfer policy: if someone wants to move - unless they have perf issues - they can. A few - like Facebook - even actively encourage moving.

At these places, internal transfers will almost always have priority over external hiring.

When a new team is created, or an internal team is growing, the positions are advertised both internally and externally. Except internal candidates have a lot more information: they can directly ping team members and managers.

It's what happened when my team was growing at Uber.

As a manager, which hire would you rather take on? Someone coming from outside, who needs to onboard for months? Or someone with years of context at the company, and a track record?

When starting a team, you want to seed it with internal transfers, if possible.

There are certain teams that are always "sought after", internally as well. Platform teams are often popular (as it's both an interesting challenge, and an opportunity to grow beyond the senior level). Well-known products from the outside.

This is why I suggest to people, if you really want to work on specific teams at Company X... just try to get into Company X, as long as they have an internal transfer policy.

Once you're in, it will be 10x easier to make that move.

This is also why you see some people spend 10-15+ years at the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and many others.

They did not work on one team. They almost always switched teams every 2-4 teams... often seeding some of the "next big thing" teams. They had the internal scoop!

And just a final anecdote.

At Uber, I created a mobile platform team in Amsterdam - the first one within my org. I never hired for this team externally... as internally there was already huge interest and the right skillset.

Externally we hired to "backfill" for these people.

Q: "What are your thoughts about standup meetings and how they should be conducted in a scrum team? How can engineers make these meetings effective?"

A: My view has changed dramatically on standups over the years, from "we must have them" to "well...". A thread + resources: https://t.co/gtRfncFkCo

1. IF you have a standup meeting (usually, daily), make it SHORT. This means don't have more than the minimum necessary people, stick to the point, and take longer discussions for after the meeting.

All of this made sense in the office, but with remote, things change a lot:

2. IF you have sync standup meetings as a remote team, the very least have some sort of agenda document that people can fill out ahead of time. It makes the meeting more focused, discussions easier to follow (or catch up on).

Here's a template I created: https://t.co/eJrR5UBHOK https://t.co/Yno7d09CBX

3. IF you have a doc that goes with the standup... do you *really* need to have in-person standups with the team? Can you not just fill it out by a certain time, and everyone reviews it?

Most my teams at Uber ended up doing this, and meeting in sync only a few times per week.

4. I've come to realize, as a manager how *I* think team standups should be run are not always the most efficient.

I've started to encourage project leads to have full autonomy to decide what they want to do. Guess what - these templates and async standups came from them!

5. Here is my philosophy on team leads & why I decided to rotate project leadership among team members. It comes with a document on what I expected from project leads for output, but without specifying the "how".

Here's what that doc says about standups:
https://t.co/o8ERTbHIdy https://t.co/j7DSIzK4yN

6. One last thought on scrum.

I used to do scrum "by the book" at Skype in 2012-2014. Never did it since, and my teams worked just as good.

Here's why I don't think scrum matters (at all, to be honest), but what other things make projects successful: https://t.co/c6gdPu0KKM

"Why would anyone do this? It's a total waste of time."

I personally tend to do a lot of activities where many - if not the majority - of people would take the above stance. And usually see good results - the long term.

I call this "an investment mindset". Here are 6 examples:

1. Preparing for sw eng interviews.

Some say: "Total waste of time. You prep for a week, or a month, then you fail."

Me: "I prep for a month or two, and even if I fail this interview, interviews are similar across the industry." 

It's how I got into Uber as a senior engineer.

2. Building a niche project that will have very few users.

I build a cocktail website in Hungarian, for Hungarians while at college. I spent months and months on it, then optimizing it... until it became the #1 Hungarian cocktail website. It's how I learned web development.

3. Betting a new platform few bet on.

Most mobile devs in 2010: "iPhone and Android is where you want to be."

Me in 2010: "Windows Phone could be big... or at least have little competition on launch."

Built a few apps that had more than 15M downloads, and opened so many doors.

4. Starting anew with a new tech.

Many people: "Why would I switch to {other stack}? I'd start from scratch."

Me: "Why *not* switch to {other} after I know my current one well enough? I get to learn on the job."

It's how I learned thick client, backend, web, iOS, Android.

5. Writing a book.

Many people: "Writing a book? Too much time and you don't make money."

Me: "Writing a book? I don't know enough to write a book about this topic. But maybe if I write a book about it..."

I know more about mobile *after* writing https://t.co/9iXKja2hCy

6. Starting a blog.

Many people: "Too much time. Too much effort. No one cares."

Me: "What if I do it for myself? Write as a way for me to reflect on what I've learned. Use it to improve my writing and make my ideas more cirsp."

This blog is the result: https://t.co/svCAkNmhox

Summarized my investment mindset in more depth and examples in this blog post: https://t.co/VMLvIue8Iv

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