In this episode, I sat down with Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) to talk about the new bar for software engineers in the age of AI—especially now that AI can write code that’s “good enough” for a lot of tasks. We went deep on what’s actually changing versus what’s not. The big shift: coding used to be a strong hiring filter because most people would give up. Now, with AI, “everyone can do it,” which forces companies to rethink interviews—and forces engineers to rethink what makes them valuable. Gergely also shared a brutally honest look at hypergrowth from the inside, using Uber as the case study: from the outside it looked amazing, but inside it was duct tape and Google Sheets. The microservices story was especially interesting—Uber’s architecture wasn’t just a trendy choice, it was a scaling strategy for hiring lots of junior engineers while centralizing senior talent into platform teams. My biggest takeaway is that the engineers who win going forward aren’t the ones who can merely crank out code. They’re product-minded: they understand what we’re trying to do, ask sharp business questions, make tradeoffs, and can tell what “good” looks like. And for managers, the expectation is rising too: there’s no excuse to be non-technical anymore—leaders need to be able to dive deep, and sometimes pick up the shovel and do the work.