What Gergely Orosz thinks about team size
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Gergely Orosz did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
3 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Gergely Orosz has said — not written or endorsed by them.
The line under a date shows how recently it was said: empty within a month, full after three years.
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Their wordsTheir business depends on co’s not having enough in-house dev capacity, and thus “renting” devs from them.
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Our readingWith AI tools, in-house development teams can do more and need less rented developer capacity.
Their wordsBut with AI tools, in-house dev teams can do more, and need less “renting”
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsa healthy oncall schedule needs 6+ engineers if every alert is to be taken seriously by an engineer whose main focus is oncall and systems stability.
↗The Pulse: Meta wanted to reduce teams by 60% because of AIblog.pragmaticengineer.com
The line under a date fills as the words age, a quarter at a time: past a month, six months, a year, and three years. Empty means said within the last month; full, more than three years ago. It says when, not whether it still holds — a change of mind is marked on the claim itself.
Dashed means we only know the words existed by that date; they may be older.