High-growth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein
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High-growth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel DeinFrom Uber to CloudKitchens, Charles-Axel Dein shares lessons on thriving in hyper-growth and building durable skills.
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— In this episodeWhat does it take to do well at a hyper-growth company? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Charles-Axel Dein, one of the first engineers at Uber, who later hired me there. Since then, he’s gone on to work at CloudKitchens. He’s also been maintaining the popular Professional programming reading list GitHub repo for 15 years, where he collects articles that made him a better programmer. In our conversation, we dig into what it’s really like to work inside companies that grow rapidly in scale and headcount. Charles shares what he’s learned about personal productivity, project management, incidents, interviewing, plus how to build flexible skills that hold up in fast-moving environments. Jump to interesting parts:
We also discuss:
If you’re at a fast-growing company, considering joining one, or looking to land your next role, you won’t want to miss this practical advice on hiring, interviewing, productivity, leadership, and career growth.  The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode
Timestamps(00:00) Intro (04:04) Early days at Uber as engineer #20 (08:12) CloudKitchens’ similarities with Uber (10:41) The reality of working at a hyperscale company (19:05) Tenancies and how Uber deployed new features (22:14) How CloudKitchens handles incidents (26:57) Hiring during fast-growth (34:09) Avoiding burnout (38:55) The popular Professional programming reading list repo (41:10) The traits of high-performing engineers (53:22) Project management tactics (1:03:31) How to get hired as a software engineer (1:12:26) How AI is changing hiring (1:19:26) Unexpected ways to thrive in fast-paced environments (1:20:45) Dealing with imposter syndrome (1:22:48) Book recommendations (1:27:26) The problem with survival bias (1:32:44) AI’s impact on software development (1:42:28) Rapid fire round ReferencesWhere to find Charles-Axel Dein: • X: https://x.com/d3in • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesaxeldein/ • GitHub repository: https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming Mentions during the episode:
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