Software Engineering Daily

EconTalk is a weekly economics podcast that has been going for a decade. On EconTalk, Russ Roberts brings on writers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs for engaging conversations about the world as seen through the lens of economics.

Russ Roberts is today’s guest, and it is a treat because I have been listening to EconTalk since 2006 and it was a central point of inspiration for what Software Engineering Daily has become. On this episode, we talk about how software impacts the world economically, from bitcoin’s promise of zero cost transactions to the opportunities and regulatory challenges of the software-enabled gig economy.

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Negotiation is an important skill for software engineers. The salary you negotiate at the beginning of your job could be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of an engineer’s career, but intimidating recruiters and exploding offers scare many engineers from negotiating at all.

Today, Haseeb Qureshi returns to the show to discuss his epic story of salary negotiation. On a previous episode, Haseeb discussed leaving his career as a poker player to join a coding boot camp and start down the path of a software engineer.

In this episode and his recent blog post, Haseeb describes his approach to the job search and salary negotiation process, which eventually landed him at Airbnb with a $250,000 annual salary–after about a year of learning to code.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Transferring money from one country to another is expensive, and the banks that facilitate money transfer have tricked us into believing that it should be expensive. On today’s show, Harsh Sinha explains the peer-to-peer system of transferring money with TransferWise, where he works as VP of engineering.

The post P2P Money Transfer with TransferWise’s Harsh Sinha appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Pieter Hintjens grew up writing software by himself. The act of writing code brought him great pleasure, but the isolated creative process disconnected him from the rest of the world. As his life progressed he became involved in open source communities, and he discovered a passion for human interaction.

The post Death and Distributed Systems with Pieter Hintjens appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Google researcher Jennifer Wang co-wrote a paper called “Gender Differences in Factors Influencing Pursuit of Computer Science and Related Fields”. The paper focuses on a survey of 1700 high school and college students, and takes a statistical approach to understanding why women are not pursuing computer science.

In our conversation, Jennifer talks about the two influences that lead to fewer women in computer science: encouragement and exposure. The problem of encouragement: women often do not receive encouragement to go into computer science. The problem of exposure: women are often unaware that computer science even exists. On this episode, we explore the roots of these problems, and other results of her demographic study of young students.

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Engineering managers start out as engineers. Eventually, there is a fork in their career road where an engineer can choose to move up into management or continue on as an engineer in a more senior role. Changing to management involves an increase in responsibilities, a different set of goals to focus on.

Jon Emerson was working at Google as an engineer when a project he was working on started to get more attention. He moved into management, and spent several years at Google as a manager. Today, he works at Hired as a director of engineering, leading four different teams. Full disclosure: Hired is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily, but this episode is not about Hired itself. We do start out with a discussion of the hiring process, because of Jon’s domain expertise around hiring, but most of our conversation focuses on the role of a manager, and the role of a director.

Most of the episodes of Software Engineering Daily focus on the day-to-day life of an engineer, so it was interesting to get a perspective from someone higher up the management chain, who has more visibility over entire software projects.

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