Gergely Orosz on the motivations, trade-offs, and reverse culture shock of senior engineers leaving large tech companies for startups or smaller teams.
The Pragmatic Engineer· 16 min read· 2026Save this - and 500 more like it - to your library.
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Get Linkwise — free on iPhoneThe programmer using a less powerful language is at a disadvantage, like a soldier fighting on terrain chosen by the other side.
The Blub paradox in one line. Every team defaulting to Python or Java fights on terrain chosen by the other side. The choice of weapons is itself strategic.
Companies that truly leverage AI will be new ones that start without legacy employees, not incumbents replacing them.
AI winners won't be retraining 50,000 people to use copilots—they'll be founded by people who never built the old workflows. Incumbency is the moat in reverse.
Ahead of AI (Sebastian Raschka)A curated roundup of the year's most notable LLM research papers, covering new models, training methods, agent architectures, reasoning improvements, and efficiency work.