Top all-time · #122
Gergely Orosz
Personal blog · newsletter.pragmaticengineer.comprogrammingcareerbusiness
Gergely Orosz writes The Pragmatic Engineer, a personal blog at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com about programming, career and business. Since 2021, 304 different Hacker News readers have linked it 479 times, most often “Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation in the US, UK and India”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Gergely Orosz's Pragmatic Engineer newsletter for industry data and inside reporting on tech layoffs, engineering salaries, and company practices, plus interviews with engineering leaders. Commenters also point to its podcast episodes and deep dives on specific companies.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- commenters: "good reading", "really good", "very accurate inside information"
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Highly relevant for software engineers, AI engineers and engineering leaders, useful for those working in tech. Click to read The Pragmatic Engineer, a Substack publication with millions of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation in the US, UK and India10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2025-03-04
- The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What's in your tech stack?9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2025-07-15
- /7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-12-24
- How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-09-27
- Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2024-01-09
- How Claude Code is built6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-09-23
- Stack Overflow is almost dead6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-05-15
- When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-01-07
- Why Techies Leave Big Tech – By Gergely Orosz6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-10-15
- The end of 0% interest rates: what it means for tech startups and the industry6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-01-09
What Hacker News says?
No, standard is about half of full time employees are programmers. This website has them at about 42%: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/facebook
Comment linking /p/facebook
on “Meta lays off 11,000 people”Submitted Inside the longest Atlassian outage as a story · 1232 points
HN discussionYou are correct saying it's not the R&D deductions. But it's not "greed": it's the end of zero interest rate policies. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp
Comment linking /p/zirp
on “The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs”Submitted What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast as a story · 685 points
HN discussion"About 80% of kernel contributors are paid – by their employer!" -- https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-buil... (from 2025) Check out "Most active 5.10 employers" table (it's from 2020) on https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ "Seventy-five percent of all kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work" -- https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/the-linu... (from…
Comment linking /p/how-linux-is-built-with-greg-kroah
on “What we talk about when we talk about sideloading”Submitted How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum as a story · 584 points
HN discussionOver 650k tech layoffs have occurred in the last 4 years. Companies have tried as hard as they can to offshore and use visa labor to avoid hiring US citizen workers. This doesn’t account for new job creation needed for workers entering the workforce. Corporations are also hiding jobs from US citizens (citations which you can find in my other recent comments). https://layoffs.fyi/ Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemplo…
Comment linking /p/state-of-the-tech-market-in-2025
on “Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says”Submitted Rebellion at DataRobot over insider stock sales as a story · 165 points
HN discussionThe archetype of "Coding Machine" for senior staff engineers at FB was created because of this guy: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-coding-machin... I have one of these types on my team and the level of productivity is shocking.
Comment linking /p/the-coding-machine-at-meta
on “A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator”Submitted Section 174 is reversed, mostly as a story · 164 points
HN discussionThe competitor is Michael Novati, who is known as the originator of the “Coding Machine” archetype of principal engineer at Meta. TFA gets the Risk board game story from the same article where I first heard of him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-coding-machin...
Comment linking /p/the-coding-machine-at-meta
on “A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator”Submitted What the The end of 0% interest rates means for software engineers as a story · 128 points
HN discussionReported here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30 He usually has very accurate inside information.
Comment linking /p/the-scoop-30
on “Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun”Submitted AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths as a story · 91 points
HN discussionThere is a recent podcast episode with the tool's author https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tools-for-soft... It's worth listening to learn abouut the context on how that tool is used.
Comment linking /p/ai-tools-for-software-engineers-simon-willison
on “Llama 3.2: Revolutionizing edge AI and vision with open, customizable models”Submitted Builder.ai did not "fake AI with 700 engineers" as a story · 82 points
HN discussionThe cartoon explaining Oracle's org structure feels appropriate: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-review-on-pr...
Comment linking /p/code-review-on-printed-paper-an-excerpt
on “JavaScript Trademark Update”Submitted Twitter’s ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers as a story · 72 points
HN discussionThe only suggestion I've seen that would make some sense is Section 174: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-75
Comment linking /p/the-pulse-75
on “Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions”Submitted Real-World Engineering Challenges: Migrations as a story · 72 points
HN discussionAlthough I no longer pay for a subscription and can't be certain, I used to have a paid subscription to The Pragmatic Engineer and I'm pretty sure the paragraph "brought to you by X, Y and Z" was still included in each post. I don't think there's any other advertising on the site. Might not quite meet your definition. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
Comment linking /
on “The correct amount of ads is zero”Submitted Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174? as a story · 67 points
HN discussionGergely Orosz' newsletter contained some background on Oxide in 2024: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/oxide
Comment linking /p/oxide
on “Our $100M Series B”Submitted AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem as a story · 59 points
HN discussionPodcast interview with the CEO of Windsurf talking about the tech behind it https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-windsurf...
Comment linking /p/building-windsurf-with-varun-mohan
on “OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B”Submitted GenZ software engineers, according to older colleagues as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI had a podcast conversation about this recently: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tools-for-soft... I think LLMs mean developers can build stuff faster, which reduces the cost of developing software. My optimistic scenario is that this expands the market for custom software, a lot. Companies that would never have considered developing their own software - because they'd need six developers working for…
Comment linking /p/ai-tools-for-software-engineers-simon-willison
on “Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week”Submitted Startups on hard mode: Oxide. Part 1: Hardware as a story · 30 points
HN discussionTIL anyone making less than $1M/yr is budget. I was specifically calling out being able to do so (easily) from within the ORM itself, so I think implying that I don't know you can just call the database directly is a bit of a strawman. At the risk of going off on a tangent, the median dev salary is something like $100-150k/yr. So half of devs in the country make less than that. Gergely Orosz has a great discussion o…
Comment linking /p/trimodal-nature-of-tech-compensation
on “The best programmers I know”Submitted Building Bluesky: A Distributed Social Network as a story · 30 points
HN discussion
