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This is a blog post I first started thinking about writing back in mid-2020. This was about a year after Gergely Orosz published his famous The Product-Minded Software Engineer.

I’ve been working in the London startup scene for over 10 years now — starting off by creating a startup, doing pretty much everything you can do wrong as a first-time founder, then joining early-stage startups in the enterprise services space for big financial institutions, having a stint in e-commerce, and finally landing in health tech. Always in startups that go from 0→1, always early, always with many responsibilities, accountabilities, ownership, and challenges to juggle on a daily basis.

I’m writing this post as if we were “b.c.” (before ChatGPT release). Since then, the world in software engineering has changed a lot, and the level of expectations for the same role has been rising at the beginning of every year/half-year — but lately it feels more like a three-month cycle. Blog post to follow on that one later.

So for now, as in b.c, what does a good startup-minded engineer have compared to a “default” engineer?

I finally got time. I finally can write the post.