Efficient scaleups in 2024 vs 2021: Sourcegraph (with CEO & Co-founder Quinn Slack)

every decision that I made back in 2021 I now regret the backdrop was that developers were so in demand and you had a lot of people that had understandable but unrealistic expectations a lot of our managers time was spent managing the growth and trying to manage in peacetime mentality in hindsight it was not peacetime and this idea of how do we do everything a little bit faster how do we do everything higher quality how do we say no to more things I think a lot more companies have adopted that now and I think a lot of companies in US included I really wish that we had done a lot more of that back in 2021 welcome to the pragmatic engineer podcast in this show we cover software engineering at Big Tech and startups from the inside after each episode you'll walk away with pragmatic approaches you can use to build stuff whether you're a software engineer or a manager of engineers in this episode I sat down with software engineer ter founder Quinn slack to talk about how the reality of tech scale-ups have changed over the past few years Quinn is the founder and CEO of source graph a code search tool and code intelligence platform Source graph was founded in 2013 and has raised a total of $248 million in funding so far in my conversation with Quinn we cover details on how Source craft changed how it operates in 2024 versus 3 years ago in 2021 practical Ai and larg language model use cases and advice on how to best use them why Source craft changed from location independent pay to location based pay and a lot more let's jump in before we kick cough would you mind starting how Source craft started which has now been 11 years ago and how did things evolve since then yeah I have been a developer all my life I love coding you can't pry me away from it and I love that you get to build something and then just get it out there to millions of people and nobody knows where you're from or what age you are it's this incredible equalizer and this incredible sense of creation but I found that that spark of creation you don't really get that when you're working in these massive code bases so uh I was working on some patches to Chrome and op SSL and Firefox and to even understand those code bases I would set up a code search tool and at the time this was back in 2009 or so the code search tools are very primitive it was like felt like you were on Old MS DOS library computer and then I went in and worked inside some big Banks and they had so much code they had things like SharePoint and it was so hard to figure out who even owned this code or why is it broken and so we just said there's got to be a better way and my co-founder biang he had been at Google where they famously have this amazing code search tool that everyone loves they got a lot of great internal tools but this is like the most loved and what's it called it's called code search code search one word Capital C capital S so uh we knew that there was a better way to do it and we just wish that we had that kind of amazing code search tool inside these big Banks or inside these projects that we were hacking on in open source so we decided to go start Source graph and we knew that code search was something that was in this perfect intersection of something that we would use ourselves that we could build and that would be really valuable because ultimately it means bringing all the code from all these different code bases many cases different code hosts different languages and it was this thing that every developer would use and there were not a lot of tools like that at the time because everything in developer stuff is so fragmented different languages different editors you know different CI systems tons of repos everywhere people are so opinionated but code search was this odd Gap that we could fill and make the best code search and then from there there'd be so many other things that we could do being the only tool that's got all the code and all the devs so 11 years later here we are we probably thought that it would take us like a year to do all of this but 11 years later here we are and we got Uber as a customer as you said they were one of our very first and now we got a ton more and uh loving every single day of it awesome but speaking of changes so one change that has been a huge one is how scaleup so you're a scale up how how largest source craft flly in terms of like people funding we have about 180 people on the team and that that's globally distributed as far as funding um believe we've raised a little over 200 million and and and speaking of which so you're you're considered what a scale up is you know you pass the early stage startup you're actually like a midstage late stage a scale up depending on how people put it I mean I don't want to put labels on it the point is like you've kind of gone through you're really in that growth phase and in in 2020 and 2021 this was a very different time to build a scaleup like like yours than it is today and I'm just curious to hear like back then you know before you knew how how the the world changed both in terms of llms both in terms of the the funding environment what were you seeing back then and what were your kind of you know goals and how has the reality changed in terms of source craft and also talking with other Founders how do you see you know this uh this big big shift on a lot of things I feel like we've been doing the same thing that we set out to do 11 years ago and there's a lot of consistency I think that's been really good for us we've had this mission to make it so everyone codes and our product code search has stayed the same we've done stuff on top of that with Cody um and for us it took us a while to get that initial traction and Uber was one of our first customers uh but that was even five years after we started the company and wow so it was like five years to close your first or or one of your first big clients yeah I'm glad we stuck with it and there are a lot of reasons why I think for our product for our Market it took us longer to get there and we were getting a lot of users along the way so there's never any doubt but it it took us a little longer and what that meant is Buy by the time we were scaling up by the time that kind of pandemic frenzy was leading to massive Dev hiring massive investment and everything software related we had history we had staying power it was clear that we were committed and we'd been moving in this direction for a long time and we were able to make better use of that money better use of that momentum than I think a lot of companies that were one or two years old at the time and hadn't quite found their identity it's not to say that it was easy but it really accelerated our growth in an incredible way I mean you know more than 30X growth in terms of Revenue just in those few years of the pandemic and then of course we and many other companies in our situation saw that a lot of the customers that we had sold to were really struggling due to the economy this episode was brought to you by Paragon the developer platform for building customer facing native Integrations into your product whether he needs to build two waying with your customer crms ingest their Google drive files or slack messages as context for a rag AI app or provide them cross up automations and agentic workflows the list of Integrations your team needs to build will never end with paragon's SDK embedded in your interogation platform you just need to define the integration logic Paragon handles a the plumbing including authentication event listeners FAL web hooks rate limit circumvention and comprehensive monitoring this is why engineering teams at AI 21 copy. a and over a 100 other engering teams that B2B SAS companies use Paragon so they can ship integration seven times faster and focus on their core product visit us paragon.com pragmatic to see how Paragon can help you accelerate your products integration road map today and get a $11,000 credit on their Pro and Enterprise plans start your free trial today that is use paragon.com pragmatic dineer it's kind of sounded like that you also saw so you saw this this really big increase in in 2021 or 2020 and in customers and interest and I guess PE companies opening their wallets to become paying customers but I'm interested in how what were things that you changed and how you actually ran the company like let's say from from 2022 or 2023 in terms of any practices hiring um like did you did you see like different issues with retention those kind of things yeah I read this one quote from someone that said every decision that I made back in 2021 I now regret and I really identify with that the backdrop was that developers were so in demand and you had a lot of people that had understandable but unrealistic expectations they would join a company where they saw the the market cap of that company or the valuation of that company grow by 10x from the time that they started interviewing until they got the offer in some cases and that expectation is something that cannot be sustained by any company even in a really frothy environment even if that continues um and I as CEO ultimately you know wish that I had been way more aware of this but found that there were a lot of people that um you know I think and a lot of companies Source graph included joined because they saw it as a rocket ship and did not join because they absolutely love code for us that's the most important thing when we hire a new engineer we want to know that they absolutely love code and same thing probably for other companies with respect to their mission and I found Source graph with a team of people that were all incredibly talented but didn't have that same kind of hacker that founder that you know let's create something from zero to one mentality that we had earlier and that that made it harder I also saw us growing and a lot of my time a lot of our manager time was spent managing the growth and trying to manage in the kind of peacetime mentality which yeah I mean in hindsight it was not peace time yes money was freely available but it was the most amazing growth opportunity and I see so many more ways that we could have seized that and this idea of you know how do we do everything a little bit faster how do we do everything higher quality how do we say no to more things I think a lot more companies have adopted that now and I think a lot of companies us included I really wish that we had done a lot more of that back in 2021 there was some new features new products that we came out with that I don't think should have made the cut and that's on me as CEO I should not have allowed that to happen there were people who especially early career people who I think that we did a disservice by not telling them that their stated goals of being like their Idols in the coding World requires really hard work especially in that early career time it requires working nights it requires working weekends it requires grinding and that's not something that they have to do but if they want to achieve their stated goals they have to do that one of the really awesome things we did was bring on Steve yagi as our head of engineering and you got him out of retirement right yeah that's that's right I I think that he was looking for this kind of opportunity because he built a lot of the stuff around code search at Google and when we were starting Source craft we thought he was our Nemesis and he was our biggest enemy he was going around at emac conferences and talking about the thing he was building and uh ultimately you know we found him in just such awesome fit in what he wants to do and what we needed and he even though he had been at Google and a lot of people at Google you know it's not a startup hard charging environment but he just naturally had that and so you know that just focus on we are building something let's just iterate faster do everything faster let's hold the standards incredibly High that's the kind of mentality that I think you know we and every company probably needed a lot more of um him coming on was an awesome just infusion of of energy and and momentum for us and um when I think about the difference how we work today versus how we work back in 2021 it's just so much more Focus so much um faster shipping everything that we do used to be primarily self-hosted Enterprise and that meant that the feedback Cycles were at least a month for customers to go and try something well we now have it so we can you know ship many times a day and we ship new versions of Cody and code search many times a day we've just sped up everything and we've got a team that celebrates that rather than that you know sees that as something that's stressful and then from this period of like this this really big boom in 2021 what is the biggest learning that you're taking away from yourself or or that you would you know advise your your your former self like something that's sticking with you for me it's stay really close to the code and the product and I love coding I started the company because I love coding our product helps other people code and if I'm not coding all the time you know pretty much every day then I'm not going to be as fluent with all the new stuff that's happening I'm not going to know every single corner of our product as well as I should to make the right decisions and there's a lot of people who if they hear that uh the CEO of this company codes they might think oh that's I'm going to be cleaning up a bunch of messy CEO code I try not to code in the line of production as much but um I you know we've gotten to the point where it really does help me do a better job as CEO make better decisions and uh where it's something inspiring and it gives people from all kinds of different functions whether it's engineering managers or PMS or uh even our our CFO you know it gives them inspiration to go and code more and says that you know that it's okay because there's a lot of advice out there that says unless you're a full-time software engineer you shouldn't write a single line of code and I just think that's crazy it was crazy back then and it's even more crazy with AI that makes it so much easier for people to to dip their toes in coding it is interesting because I don't hear many or or even any CEO say that they do code daily CTO I I I do hear but I guess if anywhere it would make sense when when your product is is a tool that developers use day in day in day out yeah the Shopify CEO codes and I love to see that I bet there's others so are you conscious doing it are you doing it because you love doing it or is it both both you couldn't Prime me away from it you can go check my commit logs in the Cody and searc repos time it's all public as well right that's right love it what is your kind of approach and thinking of how you approach the space you know like we we we've seen approaches for what GitHub co-pilot is doing there's uh other like more bold approaches like Devon Building a fully autonomous AI agent what is your thinking of what works today and what you're hoping is going to work let's say tomorrow I am so excited by this space I think it's so obviously the future of software development how do you eliminate the toil from humans and and there's two things that matter one is the the context what information does the AI have access to and two is how are you thinking about automating it and on how you're thinking about automating it we take a different approach from what I see other people doing I see a lot of people fixated on let's get a totally new UI for software development that is not in the editor and that stuff demos really well I think we'll probably even get there eventually but I kind of think that's like those Auto Company CEOs who like 20 years ago would get up on stage and show off a dumb looking concept car with no steering wheel it looked kind of dumb and yeah it's like probably the future but that kind of thinking is not what got us to where we actually in San Francisco where I live have self-driving cars that are going all around the city what got there is putting a steering wheel in the car and going from the human driving 100% to 99 to '98 to 97 collecting the data along the way and having the AI bite off the easy Parts first the things that are wrote that are you know part of every task like updating a bullet in a change log that's the dumbest thing but I think we all can understand intuitively that an AI can do a pretty good job of taking your diff and updating your change log and that's a thing that humans often forget to do or bad at doing or make typos when doing and I think that the way we get toward 100% autom is not by setting the expectation that we can do 100% And then disappointing people in some different interface and if the tool only gets 90% of the way there then you got to switch to your editor and it's painful think the way we get toward 100% automation is by starting at zero and that change log thing might represent 0.1% of Dev work and we just keep on piling up those 0.1% that we can give a little bit more structure to that we're using AI but we're not just dropping the whole thing and having AI spit out a one shot thing or something where it iterates with itself cuz AI checking its own work you just it's like piling upon it does not end up good you got to bring ground truth in yeah and then when you say change log just to set things straight because I think that's something that I know you're doing but not as many plays you're doing by that you actually mean the change log of the product right that's right well I see I actually that that's that's an interesting concept where you're doing it lineer is doing it a some companies are doing it I think it's making a comeback now uh but it it kind of disappeared for for a while why do you see change logs being important that's an interesting area well people just want to know what's new in this release so when they get the new version of Cody or Source graft they' just like to see that so she's got sections for changed and fixed and added do you think there's a connection between shipping change logs and a focus on on shipping important and and good stuff yeah well even maintaining a change log requires discipline and even that is hard to do to have one very simple process that developers remember to do at all the right times even that is difficult and I change log it also is a really easy way to see did we actually ship a lot if you don't have much to put in your change log well that should scare you I I I guess this is yeah this is doing two things with with one like you're achieving multiple goals with just one thing killing two birds with one stone pretty much I I I love it so you know going back to the kind of two parts of AI for AI to get close to 100% of what a software developer can do which is way far in the future part of it is just the approach to autonomy you know we're taking this kind of bottom up approach but the other part is you got to get that ground truth in so you got to make it so the AI can check its work you cannot have the AI review its own code that you know it can help if you're a junior engineer you want a quick pass but that can't work especially when you have many different invocations of it you ultimately need to see does the code Type check does it pass tests does it deploy when it deploys is there a large number of Errors I mean if you fast forward this all the way to the logical conclusion you want to see does this code change result in increased Revenue when you send real or maybe Shadow traffic toward it and no one is even close to doing that forget about AI even just having an elite software engineering team at a company that is building amazing products and generating great Revenue I I would argue that even not they're not doing the last step for example do you think it it might be that these AI tools might make us more ambitious to actually do that could that be that we might be able to the companies the teams that actually use Smart Automation and they free up their time they'll have more space for these more ambitious yeah I think so I think because you're going to see the tooling landscape get turned over a lot now that AI is going to be a primary consumer of these tools so think about the logging tool the issue tracking tool the you know deployment the security scanner all these things they were made for nice uis and Enterprise features for humans to consume but what's the AI version of data dog when you don't need all those bells and whistles but you just need something that is really fast that can you know pipe some of the performance and log data back to AI I think you're going to see a lot of stuff turn over you're going to see also um there's now increasing Roi from really fast builds it was always the case for humans but a really fast build is something in the order of 30 seconds or a minute and most companies are nowhere even close to that but if you have a really fast build like let's say that given a a dirty get repo you know a diff on your local machine if you could have one command that runs all of the tests that are necessary because of that change and if that could run in 100 milliseconds or 500 millisecs then you could have the AI iterate try a thousand different code changes see which ones pass if you can then bring in really fast feedback under a second from performance data or the security scanner then you can help the AI iterate help it narrow the search space and make that iteration more successful and I think knowing that that will be really valuable I'm already seeing a lot more investment in really fast builds really fast everything I mean even in the uh you know nodejs world you went from you know really slow node slow npm now there's a lot more competition what are the areas that that because think we seen AI is really good when when you can bring in context what are areas that you see this type of these type of LMS or this type of AI not necessarily be be that good to use in terms of I'm not just talking about coding but in terms of the de the the developer process building software basically I think it's really nuanced and you have to have a good mental model of what's actually happening to know how to use it that's something I don't think we do as good of a job as we need to about uh you know creating in our users I think a lot of tools need to get better at that and one example of this is we see some people go and ask Cody just you know free form text question what are all the calls to this function or you know what's the history and just that question we don't kind of it's not a command line that's completely arbitrary they got to at mention this stuff and we can do some stuff to detect it uh to you know bring in that right data but we haven't necessarily thought of every kind of data that's that's been brought in so um think that if you're using AI you want to understand that basically the way that code chat Works in any product is like same thing if you ask chat GPT the question but you paste it in a bunch of files that you think are relevant above your question and that's that's what it's going to be and a lot of people don't understand that and it's just an expectation setting game the debuggers really make a huge difference in making your your tools your workflow better I'm not sure we have that with here yeah that's I think a component of letting it iterate letting it try things letting it understand the context see what are the actual values that this variable can hold at runtime mean that is really important data and really uh good committed human Engineers will go and get that data but the embarrassing thing is developers probably spend 95% of their time using like printf debugging and don't actually use these tools and going back to what we were talking about earlier around all these Dev tools that proliferated in like 2020 and 2021 so many of them actually are amazing products but devs just don't remember to use them and I think there's also this kind of value unlock that you can get if you make it so easy for a Dev to use this flashy new fangled production you know runtime perf tool if it's in their editor if it's one click away if it's so easy for them to get the data they don't need to go and sign in again or remember which tab to go to that is a way for that tool to go from being used by 1% of the devs at a company to I don't know 50% daily just that little change bring it into the editor there is a fear especially for new grads entering the software engineering Market or hoping to enter the software engine Market they're seeing all these powerful LMS Cody co-pilot and a lot of other things they are they are capable of doing way more than we've seen you know just a few years ago and there's this fear saying hm our our jobs going to be in in demand especially as a new grad will I have future in the industry what what is your take on on this worry I see the new grad Engineers being way more fluent with AI and using AI in coding way more than senior engineers and other people in the industry so I'm not worried about the junior Engineers that have that kind of hustle uh I think they probably do not quite realize how little adoption of code AI there is in the industry and how their relatively early adopting of it is an advantage for them so much so that they the people that are interviewing them probably do not even know how coding is change and how the way that you know that Junior engineer codes is so different from the rest of the team now that doesn't mean that they're going to get hired by those companies but that means that fundamentally they're creating value and two ways to look at this I think software Engineers have taken jobs from other Industries for the last 40 years and now it's time for software engineering to turn over but also the field is constantly turning over I mean if you were coding the same way today that you were 10 years ago well that just would not work so many things have changed the editors the languages the deployments so you're constantly turning over and I don't see any reason to think that this will mean you know greater shift by any order of magnitude I think people are used to adapting on software engineering and if anything think I always want to step back and and how do we think bigger about this it will probably mean that the value of a software engineer who knows how to use these tools has gone way up so much so that they might not need a boss or they might instead of being very far from the value that they create in the product that they create they might be able to be way closer to that which means they're going to be doing the job of a PM and an em and you know salesperson and all that means they're going to make a lot more money in the future so I'm really optimistic I think that people just need to continue to adapt to this change and everyone in software development has been doing that ever since they joined the field and what do you think about the fact that these aios they're here they're they're going to get bigger H they will produce a lot more code we're going to see a code explosion everywhere in terms of the the produce code how will that impact the the industry because we used to talk about or I remember talking about people and you can tell me if you agree or not that the more code you have the more liability you have out in the wild it needs to be maintained and this we were always talking about humans you need to hire more people to maintain it or or bugs are are harder to spot Etc how will do you think this Dynamic will play out because we're going to see a lot more code that's for sure yeah AI has gotten good at writing new code before it's gotten as good at helping with existing code so it's definitely outstripping its ability to keep your codebase high quality when you have a lot of code code search really helps so I feel like we're well positioned to help there um but I think you're going to see AI help with existing code and that's actually the the biggest criticism that a lot of people have about these um completely like agent first approaches just like let's automate 100% they might work in some cases on very simple toy brand new projects but in existing codebases certainly the kind that most developers work in they just do not work they cannot understand the codebase yet so I think that's the the big opportunity and again if you're going to make a small change in a really complex existing code base you got to be really careful I mean I'm sure you felt that at Uber if you're going to make a change to some core service you have to see at runtime you know what are all the things calling it you have to understand all the changes you have to get all this context you have to really deeply understand that yeah and and then you do a stage roll out a really careful stage roll out you you message if if if it's a really big change you actually message the other on calls saying hey I'm rolling this out I think it's okay but if you see something in your metrics please please please let me know like that that's how you kind of do it cuz you don't know like if you're going to break and in the end what you care about is like will it have an impact for the business specifically well will will users or paying customers get stuck or or complain Etc yeah and that that's probably not going to change in the end you know like we just have new ways of doing it and actually feature flags are a relatively new way you know they came in like 10 or 15 years ago mainstream that is so yeah and until kod I tools know how to do a stage roll out know how to notify the on call person until they know how to work with feature Flags they're not going to be able to make those kind of changes safely and what I've just describe that ability to work with all these other tools goes Way Beyond any agent that's out there today so I think we will get there we want to be the ones to build that certainly I'm sure that we're not the only ones and when that exists then I think you can have ai go and clean up all the really messy code so I think it's actually fine if companies are incurring a lot more Tech debt and cing a lot more messy code to move fast because their asses probably will be saved in a few years by AI but it's a bet you got to make cautiously yeah and I I I I think it is good to remember that there's always trade-offs right so like assuming you you move faster you might be accumulating Tech which is fine again just just be aware of it yeah talking of source graph engineering culture uh last year I I did a deep dive or we did a deep dive in the pragmatic engineer on how the company worked and some of the things that that just stood out as as short recap we we'll have the article in the links but you have a culture of default transparency globally equal salaries it was a full remote work environment uh you have dris uh which stands for directly responsible individuals for for your projects uh you you you had job fairs back then I think I'm not sure if ster brought that in or or that that was there before and you had uh rfc's requests for comments and a lot of them you you actually published uh and you also had well defined levels for the ICM manager track this is just a summary so this was a year ago and and back then this was up to date I'm interested in in the last year or or year and a half what are things that have changed in terms of the engineering culture or the company culture as Source craft or or at least tweaked yeah most of those are still in place with some tweaks one big change has been this IDE of job fair so just to give some context we found ourselves where we had built code search and that was a successful growing product and we knew that we needed to make a big shift in the company's priorities to go and build Cody as well and to you know tap AI there are a few ways we could have done that we could have built it as a feature in code search we could have had the same people trying to build both but we wanted to make a bigger shift because we knew that it was the future and that's what we've been saying for the last 11 years so job fair was this idea that instead of well-defined teams that had long-term owners ship over areas basically every month or every other month everyone would just re uh arrange to work on the most important things that we would stack Rank and it was good to kind of shock the system to get people really quickly working on the new thing but as a lot of the team anticipated and as we knew it's not something that works forever and it doesn't create that kind of long-term ownership and as an all remote compy company it doesn't create that kind of team camaraderie so it's clear that it would expire pretty quickly as a way to work um that's something I don't think I quite appreciated as much I think other people did on the team but for me as CEO you know I have this idea that everyone just always wants to work on the most important thing and they're okay Switching on a dime and even if they're okay with doing that that doesn't get the kind of quality that we need and it's frankly hard to manage so we did that for I think about 6 months and then we had enough stability we had shifted enough people over to Cody that we went back to the much more normal way of just longlived teams I think though that I'm glad that we did that shock to the system because I feel like if we had gone any more slowly in that transition then we it would have been a real struggle for us to keep up that momentum and and then just to explain like how that job fair worked so so you stack franked of like all right here's number one project number two project like discussing with with you or or the people who decided and then people people saw that that was a clear priority did you also like say like here's how many people were kind of expecting and then like guess people just kind of like worked out they I guess the top project probably got like more applications if you will than you expected and you kind of Channel it down that's right what was the motivation like like you said it was good to have the shock to the system which which I agree it sounds like a pretty disruptive but I mean in a fun way like mostly fun yeah most mostly fun but what what what was the thing that made you realize like we should just do something where we kind of like you know like have people choose the most important thing like Tred to balance those things some of those projects that we started in 2021 that I ultimately see or regret allowing us to get started with and they would not make the cut today they had a life of their own and it's not that they were terrible ideas they were good plausible ideas but they were not the ones that we were lined as a company around as being the very top priority projects and at the same time we had people working on them that were working hard that were satisfying customers with them and and it's hard to change that you cannot change that without a shock people were holding on to it and I don't blame them for it we needed to make that really clear that we needed them to change that they weren't doing anything wrong per se yeah but that we needed the company's priorities to change and in a world that people were coming out of where there was always more headcount where you could always do more by adding more headcount I think a lot of people had gotten used to the idea that if they were working on something that showed some promise that they could keep doing that and it's you didn't see in 2021 a lot of hey this thing is good but it's not as good as this other top priority so that shock to the system ultimately it you know mostly worked going back there'd be a lot of things that we could do to communicate it better just be more upfront with this as a shift but what's funny is I see how much of a a mind it was based on how you know seeing how the sausage was made and how how difficult it was and how many things we could have done better but there's a lot of people on the outside who say wow you shifted to AI so quickly can you tell us how to do it and VCS are having me talk to other portfolio companies so I think the grass is always greener it do sense that a lot of things that you're saying it's kind of getting a little bit Back to Basics and in in the sense that like my view is that you know there's like it's a great company if everyone works on the stuff that they want to work on but it's even a better company if it has a long-term future which means that it actually has a business that they're focused on and and the company communicates whatever that is and by the way this business changes so in your case like this was clearly you've you've seen the future coming which which is has now arrived and you sounds like you kind of just communicated this way yeah and again wish we had done it sooner which we had done it more clearly but we we get better and uh I mean ultimately every engineer wants to be working on something that's high impact to the business and that is rewarding and I I really believe that in 2021 there are a lot of people that were afraid to tell Engineers that something else was more important more of a business priority and there wasn't that kind of financial pressure so I think it's a much healthier much more sustainable world that we're in today where developers working on something as a clear tie to the business they should feel a lot more secure they don't because the world has changed and they see even the big tech companies doing layoffs all the time but if they're creating business value then they should feel a lot more secure than they were kind of on a foundation of bubbly money no I I absolutely agree and I I think we're it's unfortunate that we're seeing big Tech you know let go people even from profit centers or or the cash cow businesses but but the reality is that The Closer I Look to comp the companies that are either small smaller or more rationally run it is true that if you are adding business value and doing a good job your position should be very secure yeah and and I I think it's a great thing as a software engineer for you to have tools to know like am I providing value for the business and this goes back a little bit to what we talked would it not be nice to you know connect your code changes to revenue I mean there will be some downsides but overall I I think that will be uh like if if we even attempt to to do that and eventually we're going to get there for sure like we will have attempts and and failures but that's that's that's a history of software engineering isn't it yeah s some failures yeah and AI can make it so software Engineers are much closer to the customer much closer to the value and don't need as many other kinds of people at the company this episode was brought to you by the Enterprise ready conference One Day event in SF bringing together product and inuring leader shaping the future of Enterprise SAS the event features are created list of speakers with direct experience building for the enter Enterprise speakers include people from open AI vant Checker Dropbox and canva topics include Advanced identity management compliance encryption and logging essential yet complex features that most Enterprise customers require if you're a Founder exac PM or engineering task with the Enterprise road map this conference is for you you'll get details insights from industry leaders that have years of experience navigating the same challenges you face today and best of all it's completely free since it's hosted by work OS spots are filling up quickly make sure to request an invite at enterpris ready.com that is enterpris ready.com when it comes to compensation as as Source graph you are very early to be transparent on the compensation that you offer and now we've actually seen in the US multiple states have passed regulation that mandates doing exactly the same so in in California and in in New York so a lot more companies in the US are are now actually disclosing how much they're offering for the positions across the US especially when they're hiring in California what is your take on on this this change where we're we're we're seeing like from a job seeker's perspective just more transparency on earnings I think that it's the right thing to do for most companies and they should do that's why we've done it for a long time and we've had a pretty kind of sophisticated and transparent way of doing compensation it works for our team and we have always had to do some things differently even being more transparent uh about this because back when we started the company in 2013 Dev tools were were weird we could not compete and pay the same salaries of someone in I don't know fintech or social local mobile stuff in 2013 and SF so we needed to cast a widenet we needed to find people that really loved what we were doing that were uh you know first two people we hired one was in South Africa one was in Phoenix and we needed to cast a wide net so a lot of the kind of weird practices that now a lot of companies are doing came about because we were forced to do it early on I don't know what the impact is though of this compensation transparency because most of the people that are looking at these salaries a lot of their compensation comes in the form of equity and software engineers in general do an abysmal job of understanding the value of equity compens station and what you see on Hacker News is people grumbling where they have not ever had a good outcome there the people that have had good outcomes they don't go on Hacker News and comment back so there's a very skewed and very uh poor understanding overall of equity compensation and that's not included anywhere in the offer yeah that that's true well it it I I think it is a step forward that we're actually seeing the cash part at least and sometimes the bonus is included so that gives you a baseline at least and I guess one thing that you are doing very differently is that you're you're offering the global uh how do I say this correctly that's something we changed actually oh you've Chang recently yeah so one of the things that we used to do just uh you know initially out of Simplicity is no matter where someone was located we would pay the same amount for a given role location independent pay we a couple months ago we moved to Zone based pay MH and um you know thoughtful transition period this is a a big change in many ways um and you know part of the reason why we did the location independent was because it was a simple thing to do it's actually hard to come up with what is the right compensation multiplier for this city and the world and all these edge cases and another thing is because there's a lot of appeals to the fairness of doing that what I what we've learned since then is there's a lot of ways that it is fairer there's a lot of weird incentives that it sets up and It ultimately means that everyone who does get the same Equity compensation still as shareholders a company that cannot uh you know hire efficiently um is at a real disadvantage um so we still pay well above median salary we still are very competitive in compensation but um you know you just end up with these weird incentives and that's something that gitlab saw they are a company that many people might assume would do location independent pay because they pioneered a lot of the all remote stuff but they never did that they always had Zone based pay and at a certain point we looked around and there was one company in the world that we could find that had more employees that was doing location independent pay and we looked at their stock chart and it was just a nose dive down so we were just a you know a big aberration there it's interesting that that that you shared how your thinking has changed because again I feel that the companies evolve the world also changes and you just want to make sure that you know you're you're doing whatever makes the most sense based on where you are yeah that's right and for engineers really put on your shareholder hat and think if you didn't actually work at this company but you were just a shareholder what is the right thing to do and that's not just the kind of financial side of it it's the people working at the company want the company to stay around and they want to be able to retire buy a house on the equity and uh that that shareholder hat another way to think of it is you know put yourself in the shoes of the CEO that is a mindset that I think software Engineers would do well to adopt more I'm not saying you know always think that but uh put that hot on a little bit more and I think that that will make a lot of these decisions make a lot more sense and you'll probably find greater calm and and understanding this is kind of connected to understanding how you're actually creating customer value I think that'll give you a lot of calm yeah and I guess one thing that I I definitely saw when when I kind of looked into why companies are stopped doing the the Glo the the same conversation globally is one thing that that handcuffs you is you cannot hire from places where the the media and conversation is is a lot higher typically in some of the biggest Tech hubs like New York San Francisco London uh and and that can be a choice and especially early on that that can make sense but it that's a definite downside any company that does it either has to do weird workarounds of of doing so or or doing that and and you know that you can already see that there there's there's just no like everything everything is a tradeoff right yeah and as you say I think you're right on like it it is worth thinking about the the business side of things again if if you're on a rocket ship it doesn't like that's a great place to be in if if you're on a plane that's kind of slow crashing down it doesn't really matter if if you're if if you it's it's a different flight isn't it yeah yeah I think that any company that still maintains location impendent pay past uh you know 200 employees I think it's a symptom of a company that struggles to be real with their employees and to treat them as shareholders and that is the kind of thing that probably means that company is going to have a reckoning at some point in the future so you want to see companies that are thinking long-term thinking shareholders thinking how do we make money because ultimately that's where all the salaries come from from making money you're better off with a company that's around for 80 more years than one that's not going to be around in two years exactly absolutely agree so you've now been a CEO at source graph for more than 10 years it's 11 years isn't it yeah that's right coming up so I I want I was interested in a few things I I I don't think I know many software engineers who have been CEOs for this long and I I guess you've now been a CEO for way longer than you have been a software engineer but just thinking back of when this whole thing started out because you were a software engineer before how how was the initial transition into this CEO role back in in 2013 well when you're starting out you feel like a software engineer because uh founding technical CEO should be coding 95% of the time and that's what you did that's what I was doing uh I remember that moment when biong and I were coding up the first version of source craft and we had this spark when it saved us like two or 3 weeks because we found this piece of code that existed and we'd only been building it for a week so it was like a time machine it it had given us net time and um it's been an absolute Journey since then uh I have learned so much in particular once we really started to grow near the end of 2019 and how many of you were around that time and then after so what I'm trying to figure out what the growth means yeah we were around 25 people at the end of 2019 and now we're around 180 just under 200 so we've grown quite a bit and I think software Engineers they naturally can do a lot of things if you are if you're coding you're even if it's not a softare product for developers you're going to be able to talk to your customers you're going to you be able to talk to investors people are very comfortable and familiar with the idea of a software engineer who's now a CEO even in the Fortune 500 software engineer CEOs are very much over represented relative to most other Majors like the CEO of United Airlines is a computer science major and you can find so many examples like that so it's it's not that hard of a transition there's so many amazing advisers and mentors who will help and for me I think everyone's personality is different but for me the real growth was trusting my intuition because as you grow a lot of people have really good advice and also as you grow they see a CEO who was CEO of the company when it had zero revenue and now when it has this much and you know it's especially as a company is quickly growing you don't think the CEO is some you know expert genius that knows everything in every function and the reality is is they don't but you still need a single Direction a single Focus you need that CEO to be overruling to create that focus and that can be tough because that ultimately means overruling people that probably know a little bit more in this direction about what the co is overruling but the company needs a single Direction ultimately and that was a struggle for me to learn because I would hire these really smart people and why wouldn't I just do everything they say and trust them fully and you know it's not about trust it's about getting that alignment on a single direction that was tough and I've gotten a lot more confidence in that over the last couple years as we've grown I see that in a lot of other software Engineers too when they hire this expert salesperson or expert marketer they they can't fully just Outsource that whole function and when you say you see see it with a lot of other software Engineers you mean other software Eng CEOs that's right yeah a classic example is a company is starting to grow they hire marketer and that marketer makes the website read like just yuck and they do these kind of slimy things and the CEO thinks well that person has been at other companies before and and a lot of times the marketer is like I've been at these other companies before and the CEO set really clear ground rules about what we shouldn't shouldn't do I don't hear any of that so maybe I should do these things um that has not happened at sourcc but that's exactly the kind of thing that I see and you need the CEO to keep that ethos of what developers love and how do we win their hearts and Minds even if you have a great marketer that understands that they want to see the CEO enforcing that as well do you think you have to go through this learning I mean clearly it's very efficient when when you do or is H H how much of the things that you the mistakes that you've done you think could have been avoidable if only you've listened to I don't know better advisers or how much is this just part of the job of you know building something new I wish I'd listen to my co-founder a lot more we talk every single day I was just talking to him as I was heading over here he has a really strong conviction and is just really good at at catching me when I become a little weak or I'm too nice or something like that so having a co-founder is really good and other other people that have been through the time especially if you're going through a real growth phase that have been through the times when it wasn't a growth phase they will have more of a sense of scarcity and you know more directness um but the advice you get unless it's from a very close board member or adviser who's really in it who's like sitting in your exec meetings I think it's probably going to just be platitudes and there's so much advice out there that if you're a CEO and you're going on Twitter Hacker News all you hear is people complaining about their CEO and talking about the dumb things your CEO does and that can create this mentality as a CEO you know people assume CEOs are these super confident people but actually we're just humans and if all you read is how every other CEO is dumb well naturally you're going to start thinking all your employees think that you're dumb and that's going to you know make you lose confidence and when I say you I mean that's how I felt so just seeing enough times of that failing and then really great co-founder really great board and you know now a really great exec team much better position now but I think it's it's hard to to learn to just come into the job having that kind of confidence and most of the times that someone does come in there probably overconfidence because you do need to take some feedback and finding that the right amount of feedback to take is really hard can you like summarize how one of a week of yours or a day of yours probably week is is a better one looked like when you were starting out a few years in when you had let's say 10 people as sourc and how it looks these days and I'm asking this because I think there's a lot of software Engineers who again one day they're thinking you know I'm in this job at the startup or scale up I'm learning all the skills I'd one day like to start out and and do my thing maybe even become CEO just just like you have because we do see software Engineers being cosos and it's it's always nice to get a little bit of window on what it actually looks like yeah starting out I Clos the loop with the customer so I would build something with our other engineers and I would get it to the customer or user I would be the one emailing with them to make sure it was actually useful I would go visit them and and you know I was involved in every part of the loop and as we've grown I've become less involved in some parts of the loop just because it I I can't and I need to focus in some areas but you know the thing that I think every software engineer should do is for the thing they're building follow it all the way through to the customer actually using it stay like a dog like holding on to that and see and then iterate with that customer whatever feedback they have turn around to fix really quickly even if that means saying no I can't take on more work in this Sprint because my thing will be delivered to the customer by the way any engineering manager or product manager who hears that from an engineer will be so happy they'll be so happy to not give you more work they love to have Engineers follow through um and for me I just got to you know pick what parts do I want to be focused on and now it's it's much more kind of at at you know the other end it's um earlier on in the product how like what is the future of the product and how can all the different things we're doing slot in together like how can us bring in more context make it so that Cod today gets better and code search and the stuff we do with uh agents and automating software gets better there's technical stuff there but there's also you know strategy and then also with customers it's not you know the minutes after we deliver a new version to them but it's after they've been using it for a few weeks going and visiting them sitting with their users and the thing that I love as much as coding is getting in a room at a customer site with like 20 people who use Source graph and just hearing their complaints hearing their feedback and I always you know I might show a couple slides but then we just get our laptops we sit next to each other and I show them you know how I use it they show me how they use it you know kind of point out ideas and I absolutely love that so that's a day that's a week in the life well and that's just what you did right that's why you're in Amsterdam yeah that's why I'm in Amsterdam I mean this sounds very different to how I would have imagined a c Oro like my imagination would have been like oh I have a lot of you know meetings I I set strategy I meet with my exec team I have I have one-on ones but what you've described was was very different it sounds like you're you're doing and correct me if I'm wrong but sounds like you're you're you're prioritizing way more of like all right let me be out with either the customers and like see how they're doing it or in the product see what's going on just kind of I didn't like the things I didn't hear you say is meetings alignment strategy okrs I do that stuff too sure it's it's a little more boring and I now have the confidence to admit that's boring there's so much advice out there that says cosos need to just be doing that stuff but ultimately if you're Product Company the product and the customer those are so important and if you get those right other things are so much easier if I am explaining or communicating or aligning some strategy and I bring back hey here's what the customer said to me yesterday when I was in Amsterdam that means that whatever I'm saying is probably going to be more more right and other people are going to get aligned around it better if instead I do a ton of work to make an awesome strategy Dock and slides but I don't bring in that visceral sense of the product and customer voice one is probably going to be wrong and two everyone's going to think that's a bunch of so is is it fair to say that you've kind of found what is important cuz what what I sense from your job you have you know 180 people in the company so many customers you're going to get like your email inbox probably is flooded with with things there just too much to take on as a person but what I'm sensing is you actually figure it out what is important the number one and then you know you probably do a best effort everywhere else but you make sure that these things the customers in the product you know you do that and clear that out yeah that's right and if I'm not able to focus on customers and product then I figure out how I can get into a state where I can get back to that and that means getting the right leaders getting the right alignment um but I try to fix that as quickly as possible this is awesome it's also encouraging to hear because I I think like when I think of like you know as a software engineer if if me or if someone in my position will one day become in your position which is a CEO of of a pretty big company I I would have the my initial fear would be it must be overwhelming and you're pulled in all these directions and you know like if you're unless you've been an exac or or or someone else you can't even do it but you're you're to proof that you can do it and you can figure out how to actually sounds like you're actually having fun with this oh yeah I have a ton of fun and uh you know I make a point to do things that I consider fun because I will do those things 100 times better than the things that I think are boring and I believe that sourc is will be incredibly successful ultimately that's going to be the test though so come back and let's come back in 10 years and let's see how this goes let's go back and let's wrap up with some some rapid questions if you're okay with that yeah so I I'll I'll just ask a question and just you know shoot like what what what what comes to mind and it it doesn't need to be long it's just like the kind of first instinct or or like the first answer so sound good yeah so what was your first programming language Pearl Pearl do you still use it love it hate it I've not used it I understand that Pearl is quite big in Amsterdam Dutch and pearl are the two languages of Amsterdam and I love all programming languages but have not used Pearl since 1999 or 2000 you're you're probably not alone with it the booking.com folks will will be using it they have a few hundred thousand lines of cool but they're the biggest pearl it's an amazing company they've done amazing things with it yeah what is a handy utility app that you use that is not related to Source graph through your day-to-day or anywhere else getting the right screenshot or screen recording tool is critical and then you'll use it like 10 times a day so also Loom is a really good one glom clean shot and Kazam what is Kazam it's on Linux but screen recording awesome what is an exciting early St startup that you know of I love AMA which lets you run AI models on your laptop local inference and when the some new open source model drops they have it available in like minutes it seems and it's amazing and you also can build so many things on top of it so Cody AMA you can be in a faraday cage on an airplane over the Pacific and you can still get Auto Complete because it's AMA running locally using you know star Cod or 2 or llama oh not anything you would have done would you what's your favorite book or a favorite book I love the LBJ biographies that Lynden Baines Johnson a US president back in uh middle of the 20th century uh by Robert Caro they are the most in-depth biographies ever and you really get to learn about someone it's about 4,000 pages so it's quite an investment but highly recommended uh any biographies that you've enjoyed recently um I'm reading one about Gandhi now and have read one about Admiral Nimitz from the World War II in the Pacific I I love biographies just for me feeling understanding how other people came to make these hard decisions and one thing that always strikes me going back to this idea of finding the fun in your job is you read about like the Admiral that was leading the US war effort in World War II and he golfs and plays tennis all the time and you know when he goes back from the front back to Honolulu it must take him weeks and we have this idea that like everyone must be on all the time and in many cases doing things that they don't like but I think so many great people in history realize that if you can make a few good decisions every single year then that's what matters most in a leadership position so that gives me a nice sense of like what are those few decisions that I need to make and it's not about being in every single little thing how can listeners be helpful to you keep coding keep writing a lot of code and when you try new AI tools when coding hold a really high standard and bring that feedback back there's a lot of hype out there I think though that that where we are today is so early and we're only going to get there by software Engineers seeing through the hype and actually making sure that these tools are incredibly useful for people doing all kinds of things so feel comfortable saying that the emperor has no clothes and push all of these tools to get better and better so I guess try this stuff like you know like but then validate and just keep it real right yeah that's right awesome it was great to have you here today thank you it's great to be here I'm a longtime reader a longtime fan and it's awesome to be here thank you awesome to have you thanks a lot to Quinn for this conversation and for sharing more on how Source craft operates with Insider detales here are my three takeaways from this episode takeaway number one as software Engineers it's increasingly important to understand what value you add to the business a big difference between 2021 and 2024 is how companies are much more focused on efficiency this means they're hiring more conservatively and less likely to fund teams with headcount that doesn't contribute to the focus of the company as a developer a manager try to figure out how much your team contributes to revenue or savings or other key goals of the company are you working in what the company would consider a profit Center or what is more of a cost center we did a deep dive on this topic in the pragmatic engineer check out the article Linked In the show notes below takeaway number two AI tools are great to eliminate the toil that we developers face day-to-day their AI tools that position themselves as their goal being to replace developers or replace whatever job job they're trying to do I found it sympathetic that Quinn did not think this is a sensible path his approach is to start by using AI tools with some of the dumbest things like generating the change log for a software release I mean assuming you generate a change log and then you can take tedious tasks where these tools could help and see if you can automate some more do this one step at a time and it will actually help devs and teams and it's a lot more achievable than saying let's replace his whole complicated workflow with AI take it with number three the reality of location independent pay is that it Sops being sensible above a certain company size Source craft was one of the few companies that offered the same base salary regardless of where people worked at they did this until they grew to about 200 people and then switched this model to a location indexed model Quinn was honest about why they did it it was because keeping this location independent pay would have not made sense for the company from a business point of view basically location independent pay means that the company can hire very easily in lowcost regions but it can be hard or even possible to do this in high cost regions it also creates this weird incentive where employees are incentivized to move to a lowcost region where they can save more India and I don't know of any company that with more than 200 people that pays location independent all large companies have some kind of indexing on location and the best companies just pay the top of the local market we cover more about compensation in the article the TR modal nature of software engine salaries in the pragmatic engineer which you can check out in the show notes below finally if you'd like to find Quinn online you can do so on his blog slack. org and on Twitter SLX and Linkedin as Linked In the show notes below if you'd like to learn more about Source crafts and your in culture check out the two-part deep dve published in the pragmatic engineer called inside source graph engineering culture also linked in the show notes this was the second episode of the pragmatic inuring podcast thanks a lot for listening and watching if you enjoyed this episode I very much appreciate if you subscribe and leave a review Thanks and see you in the next one