Ben is joined by Gergely Orosz to discuss competitive sports, engineering career paths at big tech, his path to self employment, and the writing process.

Gergely is an ex-engineering manager and current author.  He's a prolific tweeter, blogger, and writer. 

Links - 

• The Pragmatic Engineer
• The Tech Resume
• The Philosophy of Software Design

Transcript -
Ben:
Hey. Welcome to this episode of The More Than Code podcast. Today, I'm really excited to have Gergely Orosz here with me. Hey, Gergely, thanks for joining.

Gergely:
Great to be here.

Ben:
I'm going to start off with, where did you grow up? And where do you live now?

Gergely:
I'm originally from Hungary, so quite a bit away. But after college... During university, I lived for two years in Kansas, middle of nowhere, I guess, but as a kid, you don't really notice that. And right after graduation, I moved to the UK, so I lived a few years at Edinburgh, a couple more in London, and now I'm in Amsterdam. Probably a bit more friendly here and now I have a family and kids, and this place is amazing with kids. But yeah, moved around quite a bit.

Ben:
Kansas, as in Kansas in the States or is there another Kansas somewhere?

Gergely:
Yeah, in the States. No, it's Kansas in State from when I was five to seven. My parents were researchers, so they got a grant there to work there. So I was in this tiny town, which seemed huge at the time called Lawrence.

Ben:
Cool. Is there a specific field they research in or what did they do?

Gergely:
It's Chemistry. It was really ironic because my dad told me that. This was in the... When he graduated, it was in the '70s or, yeah, I think late '70s. And at the time there were two fields that were really booming, chemistry and tech, as in software development and he wasn't sure which one to choose. He actually programmed in Fortran a little bit, but in the end he chose chemistry. And he said it was really interesting because it was pretty clear that chemistry would change the world, all the drugs were coming out.

Gergely:
By the time he graduated, things started to slow down a little bit, and now he's telling me that. This field is pretty difficult, there's less innovation and that his biggest regret was that the barrier to entry is really high in terms of, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to have hundreds of millions of dollars to set up a plant, research and some of those things. When I was growing up, he bought a lot of tech books just around the house. I think he tried to encourage us to just get into this.

Gergely:
I have a brother as well, we both graduated, we both chose university to study tech and we're both in tech field now.

Ben:
Nice. That worked out pretty well, I guess.

Gergely:
Yeah.

Ben:
You've had a very impressive career, companies like J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Uber, and now you're a full-time author. What led you to transitioning from that traditional big tech career to being an author?

Gergely:
It was more situational, I never planned for it. In fact, I don't think I planned for anything in my career. When some people look at my career, it does look impressive now looking back with the names. Honestly, I think a lot of it is luck. I joined some companies at the time when they were growing, for example, I joined Skype in London. I didn't know where I was going, all I knew was it sounded like a pretty cool opportunity. And it was right when Microsoft bought them and there was a huge growth following and I got to work on some fun projects.

Gergely:
Same thing later, I managed to join this smaller startup called Skyscanner, which had a tiny London office and it was in the middle of an explosive growth. And the same thing with Uber. I joined Uber when it was really hyped at the peak in 2016 before a lot of the negative press and negative news. Uber as a whole maybe didn't grow as much while I was there, but the office that I was Amsterdam really did.

Gergely:
Why I decided to become a full-time author, frankly, it's a few months, I just had to hit a pause. I was four years at Uber and I told myself that after four years, I'll look back and decide what do I want to do. Interesting enough, before Uber, I... My brother is in startups, he's on his second startup. Sold one and now he's starting a bootstrap, but he's raised capital for a second one. So in the family, I was always in the big stable companies and he's always doing his own thing, and I saw how difficult that is. It's really difficult to do a startup.

Gergely:
A lot of people are talking about how they want to do it, but after spending a few years at Uber, I felt a lot more ready for this surprising to myself. My main goal is potentially to start a startup or at least explore this opportunity, but I don't want to rush into it. And there was this book that's been on my mind for a long time and I've been writing it on the side, and I just found that a good timing to take a break from basically big tech or working as an employee at companies for a few months.

Gergely:
I also found I have this vivid memory. When I was in the US, in college, that's where I met my wife now. In Hungary, the average salary for engineer is like $20,000, something like that. Maybe these days it's a bit higher, 30,000. And someone told me that their dad works in tech and he makes 150K. And I was thinking to myself, oh man, if I ever made 150K, wow, my life will be sorted. That's just so much money.

Gergely:
And I had this memory of I was making more than 150K now, even in Europe with companies like Uber. And I also have good amount of saving because then I was reflecting on, hold on, I do have options. I don't have to stay in this field. I can explore, I can take some risks. So I just decided to take that risk. It felt like the good time for me and just push myself to do something new. One thing I've noticed about myself, I get bored if I do the same thing for more than a year. So this is just doing yet another challenge. I don't know how it work out. I might go back or I might just learn some new skills.

Ben:
Starting with the book seems like a pretty cool intro to a startup, because it has a lot of the same challenges, but maybe the hurdle is a little smaller. You finish the book and then the thing's done, whereas the startups, now they're quite done. Is that how you're looking at it or how do you approach that?

Gergely:
I really wanted to get this book done, and the book is about just summarizing a bit of my experience and outlooks. I was a software engineer for almost 10 years and I was lucky enough then to have the opportunity to move into management, which I also really enjoyed. And I really, really enjoyed helping people grow. I got such a kick out of it and I thought I was decent adage. What I also noticed is, especially in Europe, I am based in Europe. Here there is a lot bigger divide between the, I will say modern tech companies that are pretty common in Silicon Valley versus traditional tech companies.

Gergely:
And a lot of people I talk with have no clue what a senior should even look like. For example, ...