Top all-time · #131
Gergely Orosz
Personal blog · blog.pragmaticengineer.comcareerprogrammingstartups
Gergely Orosz writes The Pragmatic Engineer, a personal blog at blog.pragmaticengineer.com about career, programming and startups. Since 2015, 307 different Hacker News readers have linked it 528 times, most often “The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)”. 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 it for explanations of Section 174's software tax change, the tiered structure of software engineering salaries, and analysis of the tech job market and careers.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Section 174 post called a great explanation; job-market piece enlightening; salary post good; listed as a favourite blog.
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.
Observations across the software engineering industry.
Most-linked posts?
- The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)46 people · 53 mentions · first linked 2021-03-08
- Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?21 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2024-01-04
- How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2021-09-21
- The Product-Minded Software Engineer13 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2019-09-05
- /11 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2020-01-02
- Stack Overflow is almost dead9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2025-05-15
- What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-10-20
- Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-05-17
- Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-01-21
- Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-09-17
What Hacker News says?
No, I'm talking about the section 174 update. Great explanation here. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
Comment linking /section-174/
on “Panic at the Job Market”Submitted Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well as a story · 1109 points
HN discussionIn short, section 174[0]. It pushed almost all SWE jobs to be classified as R&D jobs, which changed how taxes are calculated on companies. They have an example at [0], but I'll copy it here. For a $1mm income, $1mm cost of SW dev, with $0 profit previously you paid $0 in tax (your income was offset by your R&D costs). Now it would be about $200k in taxes for 5 years, as you can't claim all of the $1mm that year anym…
Comment linking /section-174/
on “OpenAI to become for-profit company”Submitted Data structures and algorithms I actually used while working at tech companies as a story · 1025 points
HN discussionThanks! > I do have to say, I was somewhat surprised by the low multiple on the valuation, but perhaps that's just what the range is for a business of this nature. We're spoiled in the world of software and recurring revenue. Yeah, from what I've heard, SaaS businesses sell for a much higher multiple, often selling as a multiple of revenue rather than earnings. The other thing that's really reduced valuations is int…
Comment linking /section-174/
on “I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business”Submitted What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not as a story · 805 points
HN discussionWhat you are likely running into the the trimodal nature of software salaries [1] that has been extensively discussed here on HN in the past. tl;dr there exists (supposedly) in the global market, 3 tiers of tech companies, with 3 distinct salary ranges. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
Comment linking /software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
on “Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges”Submitted The Product-Minded Software Engineer as a story · 616 points
HN discussion>And... before you say, perhaps your salary ranges were bad, they weren't. Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit. In my opinion, salary is a sign of respect from you employer. Let's see your salary range numbers and what tier you fall under. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... Are you in Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3? Are you paying your mid-level engs over $200k…
Comment linking /software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
on “Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges”Submitted Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated as a story · 608 points
HN discussionThe problem with tree shaking has been twofold: - JavaScript is a very dynamic language with dynamic property access and a few other features that make it hard to guarantee that the linker won't accidentally remove too much - historically there was no standardized "module" format until ESM (ES modules) came up (with some time in between with few competing non-standardized proposals), so statically analyzing exports/…
Comment linking /uber-app-rewrite-yolo/
on “Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps”Submitted Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did as a story · 548 points
HN discussionYes: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-... Raw data here if you want an update: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1882532/q... It hasn't got better - down from a peak of 300k/month to under 10k/month.
Comment linking /stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/
on “Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts”Submitted Distributed architecture concepts I learned when building a large payment system as a story · 441 points
HN discussion- https://textslashplain.com/ by Eric Lawrence of Fiddler fame, who's worked for last two decades on IE, then Chrome, then Fiddler, then Chromium-Edge. A mine of knowledge on browser internals, networking, web compat. - https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ by Gergely Orosz, on mobile dev & big tech from European point of view
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well as a story · 425 points
HN discussionOP here. I’ve written this based on what qualities I’ve observed several of my engineering colleagues exhibit, who are pretty good at building products and working with PMs. And who consistently get stellar feedback from business stakeholders, certain teams going straight to them, to discuss new ideas. I beg to differ the article is super generic, as it closes with very engineering specific recommendations to build…
Comment linking /the-product-minded-engineer/
on “The Product-Minded Software Engineer”Submitted Operating a large distributed system in a reliable way: practices I learned as a story · 378 points
HN discussionJust be aware that by doing so you are ruling out a huge swathe of companies, typically the ones who pay much more than the rest [1]. It’s fine to do so, money isn’t everything, but I think it’s worth being aware of the trade off. FWIW I think any reasonably competent developer can master Leetcode to a good enough level in maybe a few months (outside of work)… The Manning Grokking Algorithms book is a nice simple in…
Comment linking /software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
on “Aging programmer”Submitted The layoffs at Klarna as a story · 312 points
HN discussionI used the following sources to create an RFC template (and promote the document culture across the engineering documentation): - https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-googl... - https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs - https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/... - https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/rfcs-and-design-docs/ Hint: tailor the process and template structure based on your or…
Comment linking /rfcs-and-design-docs/
on “Writing a good design document”Submitted Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer as a story · 311 points
HN discussionCarebit | Full-time | Full stack Rails & React Product Engineer | FULLY REMOTE | £80k/$100k equivalent Carebit is a young, design-led healthcare technology company helping hundreds of private doctors across the UK run their practices more effectively and efficiently with our web platform, along with hundreds of thousands of their patients. For too long, medical software has been clunky, user-hostile and complicated,…
Comment linking /the-product-minded-engineer/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)”Submitted How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum as a story · 275 points
HN discussionThis might be useful to you - trimodal nature of comp in NL. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
Comment linking /software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
on “Our self imposed scarcity of nice places”Submitted The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021) as a story · 271 points
HN discussionTeams often work this way in practice. The product owner has ultimate responsibility for choice and priority of stories, but like any competent leader, they will exercise that responsibility on the advice of their team. If the team's programmers are "product-minded" [1], then the PO will be getting lots of input from them, and in a healthy team will be going along with most of it - the PO is in a "first among equals…
Comment linking /the-product-minded-engineer/
on “Hard deadlines are not user-first”Submitted Want to Start a Startup, as a Software Engineer? Sell Something Online as a story · 262 points
HN discussionThe post is solid on criticising sprint deadlines, but doesn’t give many suggestions on what works better. Except for this: > Another idea is to experiment with more elaborate probabilistic ways of setting shipping estimates rather than gut based estimates. In my experience, teams setting estimates and holding _themselves_ accountable is a great way to go with multiple benefits. This is why I’m a big fan on estimati…
Comment linking /yes-you-should-estimate/
on “Hard deadlines are not user-first”Submitted Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat as a story · 261 points
HN discussion
