YouSaid · the spoken record

Gergely Orosz

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75
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2022-11-17
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2022-11-17
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  1. “I write every post over multiple weeks, most of them. Some of them I might be able to write faster. But what I now have is nowadays I actually write two articles. So I have the Thursday, that is the scoop, which actually is a lot easier for me to write, interesting enough. And my cadence is that on Monday, I finish up the last of the post that goes out on Tuesday. It's a small edit, but it's already done pretty much. So it's just a few small tweaks. Maybe I have some feedback coming in. On Tuesday, I published this post and I do some free writing. I kind of write about some other ideas that I have that's going to be future posts on Wednesday. It's kind of my free day in between where it's interesting because what I feel is when I don't have pressure, I tend to not do much stuff, which might just my mind saying you just need to chill. Maybe that's it. But one thing I missed from the core broke world. And, you know, if you're listening.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “They have like one a month. Like, seriously, like you look at the investigative journalist, they might even have less because, and they have a bit of a different level. They have to check with legal and all those things. But my editor is a journalist. So he was actually telling me like, oh, yeah, you actually leave him back then. You actually write a lot of original stuff because a lot of my emails are about like five, six thousand words, which is considered very long.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Is I cleared my calendar. So I said, I'm not talking with anyone, I'm just doing this. So, in that sense, it was good. But the one thing I realized, if you look at any journalist who's doing stuff full-time and they're writing like not these clickbait articles, but actually in depth. You look at the Washington Post or New York Times, search for the name and look at the articles that they write and they're going to be longer articles.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It takes at least a few days or sometimes even longer. Sometimes it takes a week or two for me to research in terms of talking with people. I chose topics that are not covered because why would people pay for something that is out there already or well known? Then I need to write off, write a first draft. I get some feedback from people who I trust often, not always, but I often do. And then there's an editing phase where I work with an editor who kind of helps make sure that it's just correct. And all of these things usually just kind of add up. Even if I only spend a day researching the stuff, it's like a day researching and then I kind of have a draft on day two, draft day three, I get feedback on day four, it's editing. It's almost a whole week. So I was working on parallel things at the same time. I was often like running against the deadline. I was barely finishing it, which is not what I was expecting initially. So the first few months, I feel was a bit more stressed. But again, the good.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I started the news that are saying I'm going to post once a week. Like, you'll have one pinned up post. And I started to do that. But interesting enough, eventually I up to two. So I now promise people two posts a week. There's a more in-depth and more timeless post about some software engineering topic on Tuesdays. And there's something that's called the scoop, something a bit more timely where I reflect or analyze what's going on on the market, interesting stuff I'm hearing. And every now and then there's a bonus post. So I'll say two on average. The second one came a lot later. But initially, in the first few months, I was like, all right, I have this like one post per weekend and it needs to be good. And it was interesting because you would think writing a post a week is not a big deal. It's easy. As you said, let's say you're making 300 cages writing one post a week. But it actually was pretty stressful in the beginning because it turns out to write that post.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, I'd like you to be a founder or someone who's high up so that I can actually take full responsibility for the things that I want to do or I don't want to do. The short of it is I decided to leave in July. We have longer notice periods in Europe, so I serve a longer notice period and then kind of left. But it was a year after the decision.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “But when I was promoted into management and it wasn't promoting into it because it was a sidestep, I didn't get salaries or anything, but it still feels like a promotion. They only promote the people who only let people transition who are considered pretty good. I felt this would be a big deal. I'm now a manager, right? What no one told me is, yes, I was a manager, but I was a middle manager. I didn't have too much authority. I didn't even have a budget for my team. Like, you know, someone was underpaid and I couldn't do anything complained for HR for six months and hope that they do something. So it was pretty frustrating because I didn't feel in charge in the sense that I didn't have decision making process. And the reason I wanted to do a startup is I decided like I liked being a manager, but I did not like how I was not in charge and I couldn't take corporate for what's telling us to do stuff. And then we were telling them, no, that's BF. We can't, I don't want to do that with my people. So I decided as for next job, I could be doing this, but instead, I'd like to be in charge.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And in July, I went to a holiday, and like two weeks, and I just realized I need to leave. And I should, and I really had the urge to do somewhere where I'm in charge. And if you're a manager listening to this, you might relate to this. If you're an engineer listening to this, maybe just, you know, shut your ears or you'll figure it out eventually.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Was pretty much a year, a little bit less than a year. Might have been like 10 months or so, but it was a year from when I decided to leave Uber. So Uber did layoffs in April and it was really stressful. So it was the first time I didn't lay anyone off, but people on my team were laid off. I wasn't told who's going to be laid off. It was just really stressful. I mean, it's weird in the sense that the people who were let go obviously were worse for them, but I still felt terrible. I just didn't feel that good about it. I think this was the breaking point. This was a point where I realized that it's not a family, which is weird because it never was, but it kind of felt a family-like, but it's just a corporate and I'm just a number. And, you know, this could happen to me against. So I think I lost my sense of like the trust in the system that it'll take care of me because I saw some of my colleagues who are really good professionals. I'd argue they were better software engineers and managers than me. They got let go because they were in the wrong team. So this was April.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And I had the super long list. So I was like, okay, ideas also check. And then I just screw it. I'm going to take a risk. It's a bit of more of a professional risk and maybe a financial one as well. I'll announce that I'm going to start a paid news that are every week. I'm going to write something really in-depth about software engineering. It's going to start next week. And I told myself that I'll do this for six months and I'll see what happens. If there's traction, it's great. You know, I might have found myself a new job, basically. If not, I'll just refund people like everyone who bought an annual subscription. I didn't tell this to people, obviously. But for six months, I'm going to give it my all. You know, like it's basically like a startup. So I told her like and my family that it's going to be a lot of work. I know I thought I'll be around as much. And they supported me. And then I took a plunge. I took a big breath and started off. And that's how it went from leaving Uber to start a venture funded, start up to”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Just like spending more time to finish my book. But what I didn't like about books, even though I was making money, is it really kind of it's hard to predict how, like, if you're going to be making a living or there's some people who actually like this excitement, but I didn't like it. Like, I didn't know if today I'm going to be making like 50 to 50 bucks or 10 bucks or 300 bucks. So I was like, interesting. There's this paid newsletters, which I've been thinking about. You were one of the few people who shared some of your early numbers. And I figured this could be interesting because it's recurring revenue. And the only reason I was really hesitant to start a paid newsletter, I was thinking about doing so for at least like six to 12 months is I was worried about writing every single week something really, really kind of, you know, worthwhile reading in a lot of work. But then I looked back and I saw that I wrote three books. Well, I told you I wrote two books, but there was a third one that I also published in a year. And I was like, I'm pretty sure I can write. So for two weeks, I collected ideas of what I would write about.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The story of the fisherman is that in Mexico, an American businessman sees a fisherman who's just chilling, fishing, and he asks him, like, hey, what are you doing? Like, oh, all day. He's like, well, I kind of fish for three hours. I hang out with my family. I didn't chill and I sleep every Saturday and Sunday. He says, like, all right, here's what you should be doing. You should like fish not three hours, but you should fish like, you know, like five days a week, eight hours a day from sell that fish, turn over a profit, hire more people to do it, then start to behead of all those people, then sell your fishing company. He's like, okay, and then what? And then you can actually buy an island and you can just fish for three hours. You can sleep on Saturdays and sleep on Sundays. So I was kind of thinking like, look, I have savings. I don't have like huge, but I have it for, I can still take a risk. So let me take a risk on writing. And I was thinking originally.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It goes online that does the same thing of like you work really hard to do what you're doing right now. So I decided you know what? Let me just try giving this a go.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “If you found the company, I'll be the CEO and the founder. Maybe I'll have a co founder. This becomes a unicorn. By that time, we will have raised like five rounds of funding or six. I'll be deluded as hell, but I'll still have, let's say, five percent. 5% of the billion is still 50 million after you pay taxes, still have leftover. And I can buy a bunch of stuff that I don't need. And I was asking myself, like, all right, and then what? And I was like, well, after I bought everything that I don't need, I probably want to kind of share what I know with people do YouTube videos and kind of write books. And I was thinking to myself, like, so hold on. Like, I would go off and do this for like 10 years because that's how much you need to plan to do it. I need to stop doing what I'm doing right now because I would owe it to my investors and my team to not, you know, like spend all day on the internet writing about stuff. And then I want to do this again. So to remind me of the story of this fisherman, I think there's one.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I self-published it to the gum rose, places where I get to keep, I think, like 90% of the revenue, but still, this was really interesting. And I got to the point where like, all right, I should now start a startup. Like I should do fundraising and do all that. And then I asked myself, why do I really want to do it? And the answer was two reasons. One is I love working in small teams. At Uber, I'll be honest, I didn't really enjoy being a manager of managers. It was felt a bit too abstract. I didn't like the being in the meetings, not doing the work. What I really liked is when we had a small team and we had this really big kind of vision. And it was like us against the world. We were like 10 of us and we were just getting sub done. We were putting out fires. It was so much fun. So that was one of the reasons I wanted to start. I kind of was hoping to recreate this feeling. And the other thing, honestly, was money. This was in 2021 before the market crashed, just doing the math.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I want to do this, I wanted to finish a book. I've been writing this book for it was coming up to a year called The Software Engineer's Guidebook, which is just kind of my advice for people to grow professionally in the field. And I figured, all right, let me leave the company in six months. I'll write the book. I'll just use my savings to kind of, you know, take a break, and then I'll raise the venture capital. And what happened was I started to write this book, but I got sidetracked. I started to have fun online in terms of I was like writing on Twitter on my blog. I accidentally published a book called Building Mobile Apps at Scale. I just kind of did it for a few months. And the weird thing was if my plan was that I'm going to just not make any money. And this book, Building Mobile Apps at Scale, another book that I published about tech resumes. I just wrote these in a few months. They started making money. They made about $100,000 in the first year. And I was like, that's interesting. People are buying my books.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “My brother's on a second startup. He sold his first one to Skyscanner, and now he's building this startup called Craft Docs. It's a really slick document editing system. They just raised their Series B. So I kind of through him, I know with startup life is, and I felt I never did that. I always worked at big companies. So my plan was, all right, leave you birth, raise money and do something on platform engineering. I saw UR, a classic way that Uber alumni starts businesses is Uber has invested silly amounts of money to build everything custom internally, like everything that you can think of our build system, it's most custom, our experimentation system, our container, you know, the way we kind of automatically set that up a lot of the engineering stuff. So a lot of alumni just leave and whatever they saw, they're just building for the world to use because no other company really does what Uber does because it makes no sense, but a lot of them will pay for it. That was a plan.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And then I probably would have forgotten about this, but four years later, almost on the dot, COVID starts and it really hits super hard. We're laying off people with, we had to lay off 20% of the engineers. I was already managing a group of about 30 people. I had managers under me and 20% of the people or 15% had to be let go. And I was thinking to myself like, you know, what am I doing here? Like I looked ahead. Uber was going to have a really just bad year. I'm going to have to manage morale up to then. I helped put together this team. We had a really good charter and we had to throw that charter out the window because it made no sense with the economic reality. So I thought back like, hmm, I told myself, if I'll be here, I'll take a risk and I'll try to do something else. So I was like, all right, let me pull this trigger. And my plan was very simple. Leave Uber and started a startup, a raise venture capital, because I haven't done that before, but it kind of runs at a fan.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, so anyway, I said, like, all right, well, this is a massive lottery ticket. If it goes in like every year, I make two years of salary, pretty much, like that's how I was kind of thinking. But if not, again, don't forget I'm in Europe where we're kind of used to not seeing any returns on stock. So European software engineers will not value stock as much because they just haven't seen success stories. So I told myself, four years later, Uber exists and I make a bunch of money. I owe it to myself to take a risk because then I'll have like, you know, four years of savings in my bank, which back then I had like maybe like six months of savings or something.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Let's just stop. So I knew about Silicon Valley compensation, but I assumed that in New York, you're not going to get this. But Uber was getting closer to that. So I told myself, like, all right, so I'm getting a bunch of a really good deal. And most of it is stock, which is, which is Uber was in 2016, no one knew if Uber would go public. Although I kind of suspected because they contacted me to build a payment team to do SOX compliant payment system. And you need a Sox compliant payment system if you want to go IBU.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “The short of it is it was a promise to myself and COVID and Uber doing layoffs. And the longer version is that when I joined Uber, I mean, before Uber, I was, you know, now we're talking numbers on my old job, but I was working in London as a principal engineer at Skyscanner. Skyscanner was a unicorn, one of the few unicorns in the UK kind of UK headquarter and all that. And I was making, I think, like 90-something thousand pounds in base salary, which is like maybe 120, 130, or 140,000 dollars depends on how the pound is doing. Or sometimes these days, almost just the same. But back then, that was a really good kind of, and this was most of it. Like there was, I got some stock as well. And I thought I was close to the top of the market in London. Like, I kind of knew people and it seemed this was a really good composition package. And then Uber called me up saying, hey, do you want to interview with them? They gave me an offer. And I negotiated. And they basically doubled my compensation. I was like, oh, wow.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That is really cool. So I had a spreadsheet that I maintained for the first year of the publication where I listed for every article how much did my annual revenue go up a week later. So kind of tracking like what was the impact. And the crazy thing was that, you know, when I wrote a really good article that resonated with people, so sometimes it was an article that I thought was mediocre and people said, loved it, but often it was a really good article that I put tons of work in. I saw myself getting erased. And this is just something you just don't get incorporate. I mean, it's by design and there's a lot of good stuff about it. But this, like, I feel that this life, and we'll touch more on this, but there's a lot of surprising things, both good and bad, but this is a really good one. So you're, you know, for doing something awesome, you can just get give yourself reason, especially because this is just like you, mine is also one person business right now.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Less and I'll be, you know, but I'll enjoy what I'm doing, or I'll kind of have, I'll just give it a go. But now I am making more in composition that I made at Uber. And the difference is that now my composition, well, my earnings keep going up as long as the newsletter is growing. So there's no theoretical cap on this. Of course, there is an actual cap. There's churn. Growth is slowing over time, but it's very, very strange because I felt that I was in a really privileged position just honestly making tons of money doing an odd job that I loved. And this was at Uber or as a software engineer. And I'm now doing something that I love and in some strange way, I guess it even pays better. I mean, part of it is this lock part of it is situational. I think we're going to talk a bit more about this, but this was very, very surprising and very unexpected for me.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, so I mean, I'll share a little numbers of my cushy tech job at Uber. So, you know, I was in Europe and European tech salaries or I'll say total composition will be lower than, for example, the US, but it'll be higher than, let's say, regions like India or Indonesia. There's regional differences. And this is true for big tech as well. Uber was a good example on this. In my best year at Uber, I made about like 320 or 330,000 dollars in total compensation. This was after Uber went public. So it includes the stock, the base salary, the bonus, which was very, very good in Europe. And when I quit my job, I was actually thinking like, am I crazy because I am leaving, especially in Europe, that this means that this is a lot of money disabled. This will be similar to something in a similar position would have made like 500 or 600K in total in the US. So I walked away from that and I was pretty sure that I'll just be making a long.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “About like nine months of the newsletter, it got to 50,000 subscribers. And then the next five months or six or seven months, it went up by another 100 and something thousand subscribers. This one was one subsec introduced recommendation, which has been a massive growth engine. And I guess being one of the top obligations that kind of benefited from it. But those numbers are again. So this is the paid newsletter as well. So there's a free version and a paid version. There's thousands of people paying for the newsletter. It's a single digit percentage, but it's a very, very healthy one. And again, it just beat all my expectations. And I guess we're in a similar boat because our news that are set up, yours and mine is somewhat similar. We have plenty of differences as well. But I make most of my revenue from subscriptions and I don't do sponsorships or ads in the newsletter. So it's kind of like if people sign up for the free one, they get articles every now and then and then for the paid one they get it a lot more and in more depth.”

    2022-11-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source