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

[@63pufferfish]

I would love to work at a company where the CEO Codes.

[@JR-gy1lh]

These are type of companies I want to work for. Not the bean counters, managerial, political class.

[@stryhx]

would love to hear more about exactly what scaleups they did and what they regret. Like would love if they can answer more specific questions about their tech stack and stuff. Good video tho!

[@pragmaticengineer]

I didn't cover a bunch of things we went into the deepdive article. Here are details on their tech stack: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/inside-sourcegraphs-engineering-culture-part-2?open=false#%C2%A7engineering-practices Web: React and TypeScript, without exception. GraphQL. RxJS was used in the past, now deprecated. Backend: Go, for most services. Some Rust is used for syntect_server, and LSIF (Language Server Index Format) analyzers are written in the language they analyze. Note that Sourcegraph is moving to SCIP from LSIF, SCIF being written in TypeScript and Java. Database: Postgres, Blob store, Redis Infra: Kubernetes, and managed database services And Quinn was mostly talking about how they regretted hiring fast; the Job Fair was ok but they got rid of that as well; hiring people who did not love coding sounded he felt like was a mistake (all of these in the episode).

[@kane_lives]

NGL, this was tough to upvote. I did upvote for the effort, but I'd say that going forward the scope of an interview should be more narrow, go deep on a smaller subset of topics. IMO topics like "hiring new grads" and broad strokes on AI use in the industry should either be avoided or explored separately in a different video or even a different format.

[@david168-d6f]

46:04 "Any company that still maintains location-independent pay past 200 employees, it's a symptome of a company that struggles to be real with their employees and treat them as shareholders" Dude that's such a stretch 🙄 quite an imaginative way to justify saving costs by exploiting inequality.

[@pragmaticengineer]

Did you miss the context here? Sourcegraph issues shares for every employee on top of the salary. Quinn said he knows of one company that paid a location-independent salary that was larger than Sourcegraph: and that company had a steep downwards stock price. The point he made was that the company's priority is (naturally) to increase the company value (thus stock price) and if and when this happens, employees also do well. See also how e.g. when Uber went public easily more than 1,000 employees became millionaires (thanks to employee stock!) For-profit tech companies are a business first, and if you want to maximise your earnings as a developer, it helps to understand why they pay how they pay! E.g. why do Google, Meta and similar ones pay location-dependent salaries, yet still often pay more in the EU or even India than companies that pay, globally? And why does the same position pay 2-5x as much at other companies? Some more context here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal-nature-of-tech-compensation