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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 36m

It goes down to PR not understanding software engineering btw - these are usually business suits, with zero engineering interest or background

They think they are helping the company by "protecting" secrets like what language they use (it's on the job ads btw).

But they do the opposite

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 36m

The impact of these PR teams:

- From the outside, the company looks super boring (when it's super interesting!)

- Experienced devs looking for a new challenge never consider working there

The impact of these PR teams: worked on cool stuff have one more reason to leave

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 36m

PR stands for "public relations." It's a team inside a company that attempts to control the public image of a company.

Amusingly, at several tech companies, PR teams have become "the no publicity" teams. They end up blocking devs sharing what would be super interesting stuff

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 10h

The blog post:

Chef's kiss that it was the *exact same* private equity company that bought New Relic that New Relic so heavily implied meant that customers should move away ASAP!!

web.archive.org/web/20230319...

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 16h

as soon as the acquisition happened, but not before!

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 17h

To add insult to irony they got bought by the exact same PE firm that bought Sumo Logic (Francisco Partners) and to which New Relic predicted will increase prices while reducing quality hah!

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 17h

I still think about when New Relic wrote a blog arguing that customers should leave vendors acquired by private equity (PE) b/c prices will go up+quality will go down. It was a stab at Sumo Logic just bought by PE.

6 months later New Relic got bought by PE...and deleted the blog

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

Of course, journalists take it at face value whatever a CEO says

Last time Klarna said they cut 70% of customer support with a chatbot I actually tried it out and found... Klarna didn't even do what every other company did 5 years before with their app:

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-c...

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

And if investors view Klarna as an "AI company" not a "buy now pay later company" the valuation will be like 10x higher

This is the game

Klarna is playing it brilliantly, all the while people think they figured out how to replace people with AI (which is not the case)

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

It bothers me to no extent that the media plays how Klarna whistles

Klarna wants to the headlines to say "AI-enabled Klarna"

It would have halved its workforce without AI because it overhired 2x in 2020-21 and never corrected till now

But this is how they get front pages

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

Thank you! Ok, this I get

bsky.app/profile/konr...

Konrad Iturbe @konraditurbe.dev · 1d

Ticketing for company support. You log in, open a ticket and an internal support team at the company takes care of it. Like Zendesk but for internal use within the company.

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

And how is it a $200B company when it’s hard to understand what they do…? I’m utterly confused

Am I being thick, or is ServiceNow as opaque as it looks?

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

What is ServiceNow and what companies use it in relation to software engineering? And to do what?

(It showed up in The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 survey with similar numbers rif mentions as Backstage, and even after reading ServiceNow’s About page, I remain utterly confused.)

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

agreed on the first two. The last one: just hard to tell? Waymos have so many sensors that feels like everyday cars will not have (but cruise conrol keeps getting better and better w new cars!)

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

Yes!! It’s the freshest-ever smelling car

60% of Ubers have weird smell and I cannot tell if it’s the driver? Air freshener? Something else?

This Waymo felt… fresh I barely ever get for any Uber/Lyft/taxi

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

I would pay premium to take Waymo if and when it’s available wherever I am

As I understand people in SF already do do compared to Uber…

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

Thoughts after my first Waymo ride:

1. It drives smoother than ~80% of drivers I rode with

2. The “you know exactly what to expect” aspect (no driver who might or might chat me up, or be on the phone, or be a bad driver) is underrated

3. Waymo is the best ad for Jaguar

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

The problem isn’t engineers: it’s their god awful PR department that gets in the way of any cool stuff devs would share (and it’s nothing confidential IMO) but the AWS PR org makes it impossible

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

Every single oncall tool or paging tool now call themselves an “AI platform” or “AI-first operations platform”

🤡

(Pretty sure it’s not just the oncall tooling category btw)

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

Software engineering practices are a decade behind in most orgs

If there are exceptions I’ve yet to hear them (and I talk with current and former ones)

Hardware is top notch ofc

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 1d

Just to be clear, in @pragmaticengineer.com I do cover Amazon, a lot: but never w current engineers (they are not accessible thanks to this 1980s mentality PR team)

Here’s what their engineering culture is like, based on 20+ current and former Amazonians

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/amazon

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

One day I will write about it

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

Oh Apple of course is the one blocking the most.

Except there’s nothing to brag about there, unlike at Amazon where there would be so much

bsky.app/profile/gerg...

Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

Yes but Apple’s engineering culture is terrible

So PR blocking it makes sense

You’d be surprised how universally bad it is: worse across all of Big Tech by so much

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

Yes but Apple’s engineering culture is terrible

So PR blocking it makes sense

You’d be surprised how universally bad it is: worse across all of Big Tech by so much

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

So you won’t see any AWS deepdives in @pragmaticengineer.com : I tried hard for a while to get some of the super cool info outside, but with a PR department stuck in the 1980s they just block stuff.

And honestly startups challenging AWS are 100x more open. And they also do cool stuff.

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