October 9, 2024
Efficient scaleups in 2024 vs 2021: Sourcegraph (with CEO & Co-founder Quinn Slack)
The Pragmatic EngineerAbout this episode
Brought to you by: • Paragon : Build native, customer-facing SaaS integrations 7x faster. • WorkOS : For B2B leaders building enterprise SaaS — On today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer , I’m joined by Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a leading code search and intelligence platform. Quinn holds a degree in Computer Science from Stanford and is deeply passionate about coding: to the point that he still codes every day! He also serves on the board of Hack Club, a national nonprofit dedicated to bringing coding clubs to high schools nationwide. In this insightful conversation, we discuss: • How Sourcegraph's operations have evolved since 2021 • Why more software engineers should focus on delivering business value • Why Quinn continues to code every day, even as a CEO • Practical AI and LLM use cases and a phased approach to their adoption • The story behind Job Fairs at Sourcegraph and why it’s no longer in use • Quinn’s leadership style and his focus on customers and product excellence • The shift from location-independent pay to zone-based pay at Sourcegraph • And much more! — Where to find Quinn Slack: • X: https://x.com/sqs • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinnslack/ • Website: https://slack.org/ Where to find Gergely: • Newsletter: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/ • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/mrgergelyorosz • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gergelyorosz/ • X: https://x.com/GergelyOrosz — In this episode, we cover: (01:35) How Sourcegraph started and how it has evolved over the past 11 years (04:14) How scale-ups have changed (08:27) Learnings from 2021 and how Sourcegraph’s operations have streamlined (15:22) Why Quinn is for gradual increases in automation and other thoughts on AI (18:10) The importance of changelogs (19:14) Keeping AI accountable and possible future use cases (22:29) Current limitations of AI (25:08) Why early adopters of AI coding tools have an advantage (27:38) Why AI is not yet capable of understanding existing codebases (31:53) Changes at Sourcegraph since the deep dive on The Pragmatic Engineer blog (40:14) The importance of transparency and understanding the different forms of compensation (40:22) Why Sourcegraph shifted to zone-based pay (47:15) The journey from engineer to CEO (53:28) A comparison of a typical week 11 years ago vs. now (59:20) Rapid fire round The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • Inside Sourcegraph’s engineering culture: Part 1 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/inside-sourcegraphs-engineering-culture • Inside Sourcegraph’s engineering culture: Part 2 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/inside-sourcegraphs-engineering-culture-part-2 — References and Transcript: See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/ . For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe