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The Pragmatic Engineer

The Pragmatic Engineer

By: Gergely Orosz
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Software engineering at Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Deepdives with experienced engineers and tech professionals who share their hard-earned lessons, interesting stories and advice they have on building software. Especially relevant for software engineers and engineering leaders: useful for those working in tech.

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Episodes
  • Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters

    Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters
    Oct 29 2026
    Brought to You By:• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable• Linear – the product development system for teams and agents• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.—An engineer who helped create today’s software engineering curriculum now says to burn down almost all of it. What’s the cause of this contradiction? We find out from the lead author of Software Engineering at Google.Titus Winters spent more than a decade at Google, where he led its readability program and built Abseil, Google’s open-sourced foundational C++ libraries. He is currently a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe, where he focuses on developer experience and productivity.In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Titus and I discuss how his team tackled a massive refactoring project across Google's 250-million-line C++ codebase, why Google made testing mandatory, and his work on updating the ACM/IEEE undergraduate computer science curriculum guidelines.We also explore why traditional productivity metrics miss some of AI’s biggest benefits, what needs to change in CS education, and how new engineers can stand out.Timestamps00:00 Intro07:01 Getting hired by Google09:48 Finding his niche at Google14:32 Why Google made testing mandatory17:45 Why new engineers fear making mistakes20:40 Abseil: C++ foundations at Google23:09 Google’s massive C++ refactoring30:48 AI for rewrites39:07 Software Engineering at Google: the book43:10 Google’s readability reviews47:18 Why teams still matter52:41 Psychological safety58:17 Layoffs and culture1:02:11 Measuring developer productivity1:11:17 Rethinking CS education1:22:56 What new grads should learn1:32:08 Titus’s ideal software engineering curriculum1:36:27 Advice for breaking into tech1:38:35 Book recommendation—The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• The state of the tech industry in 2026• Inside Google's Engineering Culture• Slow down to speed up when working with AI agents• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey• How tech companies measure the impact of AI on software development• What is happening with code reviews?• When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?• Developer productivity with Dr. Nicole Forsgren (creator of DORA, co-creator of SPACE) • Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 40 mins
  • The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson

    The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson
    Oct 21 2026
    Brought to You By:• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.• Entire – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Every agent session, prompt and tool calls: stored in your repo.• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.—What’s changed in “the unwritten rules” of engineering management since the 2010s, what drove the shift to today, and what has it done to the engineer-to-CTO career path? Today’s guest is one of the best people I know who can tackle these questions.Will Larson is CTO of Imprint, was an engineering executive for 10+ years, and is the author of several popular books on engineering leadership, including ‘The Engineering Executive's Primer,’ ‘Staff Engineer, An Elegant Puzzle,’ and ‘Crafting Engineering Strategy.’ Previously, he was also CTO at Carta and Calm, and an engineering leader at Stripe and Uber.In this episode, we explore how engineering leadership has evolved from management practices shaped in the long post-financial-crisis ZIRP era to the altered expectations of engineers and managers today.Is middle management an increasingly precarious career path, and might managers need to reskill and return to hands-on technical work – or even consider retirement? Will makes the case, and we hear why the traditional path to engineering executive roles is changing, as well as why taking one step backward might sometimes be the best way forward.We discuss Will's early career, and get his first-hand account of Digg's disastrous relaunch, his own path to CTO, and he tells us why career ladders still matter. We also explore how AI is changing engineering roles and bringing technical decision-making back to leadership.Timestamps00:00 Intro08:20 Stories from Yahoo!12:47 Digg’s v4 rewrite: the insider story26:02 Will’s path to eng leadership30:03 Uber, Stripe, Carta, and Calm35:11 What does a CTO do?38:09 Will’s role at Imprint42:48 How engineering management has evolved51:08 ZIRP’s impact on tech57:21 Career ladders1:01:03 Eng 1 vs Eng 21:06:58 How software engineering roles are changing1:16:25 Revised rules of engineering leadership1:21:57 The risks of becoming a bureaucrat as an EM1:25:57 How to become a CTO?1:31:33 Middle management vs. line management1:41:36 Will’s writing1:52:13 Book recommendations—The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• The end of ZIRP and what it means for startups and the tech industry• Getting an Engineering Executive Job – an excerpt from Will’s book, The Engineering Executive's Primer• What is a Staff+ Engineer?• Inside Stripe’s engineering culture • Engineering career paths at Big Tech and startups • Staying technical as an engineering manager• Performance calibrations at tech companies• Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)• Hypergrowth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 56 mins
  • Uber’s AI infra, from the inside

    Uber’s AI infra, from the inside
    Oct 14 2026
    Brought to You By:• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable• Linear – the product development system for teams and agents• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise-ready.—What do developer tools look like inside of Uber, today? They are very different from what you would see at most places. For example, can you guess what service a system called DevPods, Code Inbox, Slate or Wisdom would be providing to engineers?Today’s episode is a deepdive into the day-to-day tools of devs at Uber, our tour guide being on of Uber’s longest-tenured engineers: Uday Kiran Medisetty. Uday is one of the few Distinguished Engineers at the company, and leads much of the work on agentic AI, today.With Uday, we talk through how Uber’s developer infrastructure prepared it for AI agents. We look at the systems Uber built before generative AI and the new tools that connect agents to its code, internal services, and engineering knowledge. Uday explains how engineers use background agents, why tools like Slate make development (and bugfixing!) more efficient, and how code review is changing. We also cover Uber’s approach to token costs and how it measures productivity as the engineer’s role changes.Timestamps00:00 Intro02:48 Uday’s early days at Uber05:40 Uber’s move to microservices07:55 Uber’s engineering team, then and now09:05 Developer tooling before AI16:03 DevPods19:28 Building for AI agents29:27 MCP gateway34:37 Agent Skills repo38:46 The context graph and Cortana47:54 PRD and ERD tool50:45 Minion54:46 Testing and code review with Bazel, Slate, and Capri1:12:26 Edge Gateway, Shepherd, and Wisdom1:21:33 The changing role of engineer and measuring productivity1:30:40 Uday’s favorite new products—The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• How Uber uses AI for development: inside look • Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO) • Inside Uber's move to the Cloud• The Platform and Program Split at Uber • Hypergrowth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein• How Uber Built its Observability Platform • How Uber is Measuring Engineering Productivity • Developer Experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 33 mins
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