The Pragmatic Engineer
00:54:57 · Gergely Orosz
[00:54:57] S0: Well, I'm gonna paraphrase it. Like, with the AI Labs, a few things going. First of all, business is booming. They are growing. Revenue goes up. Customers goes up. Funding goes up. Headcount goes up. Their teams are only ever expanding. They're on hypergrowth. Like, we... We've seen companies like Netflix and Uber in hyper growth. This is even faster. Your equity also goes up. So you you don't need to worry about things like performance reviews because performance reviews are typically important where, like, how much bonus I'm gonna get, how much. But when you're at a place that goes like this and your equity goes up, your your financial part is taken care of just by focusing on helping the company succeed regardless of your titles. Second of all, because they're building new technology and they know no one knows, so they just tell, okay, I don't know. I'm learning from you. Here's what I learned. So it's just all natural. Whereas compared to a company that might not grow like this, they might still be using, let's say, AI, but now there's less of an incentive to say, I don't know because there's a performance review coming up. You wanna look like the smartest. You don't want people to say like, well, this person says I don't know a lot. Your bonus will be lower. You might be put on a performance improvement plan because you're now at a company that every year lets go of 6% of people. Right. And your goal is suddenly going from like, I just don't wanna be there. I wanna hang on to this job, but it's now hanging on. It's now... Uh-huh. And you also... You're now very of maybe your teammates because now there's an internal competition. You wanna hog that project. Yep. And so this is a huge difference.
00:56:25 · Titus Winters, Gergely Orosz
[00:56:25] S1: Yeah. It's huge. Like, if you get into the mode of believing that the team outcomes are what matter for your own success, then it is much easier for you to realize, like, okay, I don't have to have this one shiny task. Like, the team will be successful by virtue of someone doing this, and it might be my turn next. If when it breaks down into that individualism and, like, I don't trust the guy across the way from me or right shoulder to shoulder to me, even though we're on the same team, we're scraping by and fighting for attention and success, And that's not a recipe for innovation and growth. Like, that is a recipe for stagnation and and just bad. One of the obvious things that I assume, you [00:57:14] S0: know, is is is is... Does not do good for psychological growth or it's terrible for it is layoffs. Can you tell me based on your observation? And and we've seen. Right? Like, you... We've all been part of it. And in 2022, 2023, there has been a series of layoffs. Right right now, companies are doing it again. Back then, it was to do with honest interest rates and and over hiring during zero interest rates and and growth kind of going down. Now some companies are are actually openly saying that it's AI, some are not as openly, but we find out that Meta, for example, wanted to reduce scene sizes because they thought that I will be there. From your observations, at a company where a layoff happens, how does it change how software engineers show up, work, think, speaking both about your experience, the people you talk with?
00:58:03 · Titus Winters
[00:58:03] S1: I mean, it's stressful. Like, I've had experiences of there being layoffs in the area, and just... It... It'll be weeks or months of every one on one starts with, so how are you doing? Like, how are you coping? Like, there's this huge amount of, you know, negative performance influence of like, okay. We gotta, like, emotionally support each other first before we actually even get back to doing the work. And I'm very skeptical that in the executive accounting on all of this, that they're taking into consideration just the sheer amount of lost productivity and lost time from like, yeah, people are stressed. People are spending time brushing up their resume in case they're next on the chopping block. People are spending that one on one time, like, in therapy instead of in planning. It's... It is a huge hidden cost to all of that, and it's really demotivating. It drives home... Like, it is a reminder that, okay, this is just a business obligation. This is not a lifestyle choice. And if me putting in extra doesn't give me extra safety on this, then what's the point? You know? And, like, it... There's a lot of cultural baggage that happens for that. And it's one of the things that I actually really liked about Adobe was Adobe's had the same CEO for a long time. He just stepped down. He has a replacement now. But he was there for the great recession crash. And they did some layoffs at that era, and he saw how much it hurt morale and company productivity and all of the rest of that. And he learned, like, it... We thought it made numeric sense at the time, but it was not good for the soul of the company, and that's not the company that we wanna be. And so Adobe didn't have the the layoffs in the last few years. Like, there's group by group, like, local things as things get reprioritized, but it's not the sweeping all of those. Yeah. But we...
01:00:11 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[01:00:11] S0: We've seen that. Most of Big Tech has had it, especially in 2023. Yeah. And speaking of Adobe, so you've moved to Adobe a few years ago. What are you focused on at Adobe? [01:00:22] S1: So there, I'm very senior IC focused on developer experience. I happen to say this is a polite fiction. Developer experience is the business of productivity. We just know enough not to say that we can measure productivity. It does not give [01:00:37] S0: everyone Unlike McKinsey who me and Kendra have bonded over. [01:00:41] S1: Oh. Yeah. Yes. Like, that was... That's horrible. [01:00:45] S0: But but we will link it in show notes below. [01:00:47] S1: Yeah. So it's it's what do we need for, you know, tools and culture and, you know, all of the things to improve the experience of being a developer and make you more productive and efficient because most companies spend more on engineering comp than anything else. [01:01:04] S0: So today, you've been focused on this thinking about it and working on it for both at Adobe but also to some extent at Google. What do you know today about developer productivity? How does this relate to AI, coding tool, output, metrics, all of that things? What is it that we can measure? What is it worth measuring? And what are things that are hard to know?
01:01:26 · Titus Winters, Gergely Orosz
[01:01:26] S1: Yeah. I mean, we've taken it as axiomatic that it is hard, if not impossible, to measure productivity because what are the units even? I had, a while back, a sort of clever idea, and I use that as a loaded term. I had this idea that if we don't know what the units are, like economics has prior art for this, right, you have an index metric where you measure all of the things that might influence this, and you come up with a way to effectively basket those together. And then you have a unitless, but directionally useful and useful over time, number that you can sort of pin to. And my theory had been, so measure all of the things that we think are positive or negative indicators of something is going well. Right? Releases, test coverage, number of PRs, right, like everything. Right? Just cast a wide net. My initial formulation on this was, you know, the wisdom of the crowds idea. Right? Like, no individual can estimate how many jelly beans are in the jar, but you get a 100 people and you'll get real close. So we do a, like, am I hot or not? Of like, which would you prefer? Like, one release per week more or x tests. Right? And you run a bunch of iterations of that game with your, you know, relatively experienced engineers Yeah. To work out the linear trade offs between all of those factors. [01:03:01] S0: To figure out what matters more. Right.
01:03:01 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[01:03:01] S0: To figure out what matters more. Right. [01:03:03] S1: To figure out what that is. You probably wanna dedupe some things, because they're just gonna be the same stat in a different package. Right? But find the ones that have some nonlinearity, and then mush that all together. Right? Now you have something that sort of gives you an aggregate. Like, this is kind of our productivity number. And Adobe is doing something along these lines. Slightly smarter than my initial formulation. But like, then you can watch that track up or down and, you know, over time for a given population. What I've realized is that won't capture everything in this post AI boom. And the reason that I came to that was a paper that I put out, the develop deploy operate paper Mhmm. Recently, where one of the points in there is there's four forms of impact in tech. There's product success, the stuff everyone talks about and everyone else is better at than I am. Like, that's that's not my job. [01:04:06] S0: Will people buy a product or or use a product, whatever. Yeah. [01:04:08] S1: Net promoter score revenue, like all of the stuff. Right? There's compute efficiency. Right? Like, how much are you blowing on AWS? [01:04:16] S0: Oh, yeah. Right? Or if you I'll ship send shares [01:04:18] S1: and all that. [01:04:18] S0: All too well. Yeah. [01:04:19] S1: Right. You know? Or, like, even like the Android team has a trade off for if you can reduce the size of an application download by [01:04:28] S0: a It makes a difference for