A SWE’s thought exercise
For those that don’t know me, my name is Sergey Surkov and I’ve been a software engineer here in Silicon Valley for over a decade now. I’ve been both an entrepreneur and employee and have worked with some of the best engineering talent the Bay area has to offer. I started my career here at Google, working on search ranking and UI, then subsequently founded DITTO Technologies in 2010 to help bring forward the latest in augmented reality virtual fitting technology.
In both places, I learned a lot. Each had different lessons, but all very meaningful and fascinating each time. Lessons from scaling traditional data structures to a billion users, studying and interpreting user intent from behavior, and reconstructing 3D faces from noisy unreliable video streams to entrepreneurial endeavors such as fund-raising, team building, business development, human resources, and finance.
Throughout my career though, one thing stands out the most; I had to look at a lot of code: the code I wrote, the code my peers wrote and sent to me for review, the code I had to read at Google to understand how their stuff works, the code of open source projects I’ve used and sometimes edited to make them fit my needs. What always amazed me was that this code; all these files, commits, and changes, after being written and used for their goal of advancing the software they were made for, quickly became a thing of past and then largely forgotten…
But maybe this work, an engineer’s source code and commits, can tell a story? After all, all software engineers ultimately do is write and commit code; it’s what they are hired to do. Source code and commits have it all: the languages and libraries we use, how much we show off by using fancy language features, what math we like, who we work with, how much we loath unit tests, and how brave we are to refactor.
I believe that there is a fascinating opportunity here for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, as someone who has been directly involved in finding great engineering talent, filtering through the noise is a very hard thing to do. You might say, that it is already a generally inherent problem in hiring or recruiting, but I refuse to believe it can’t be better for software engineers. A software engineer’s work is structured and readable. We should be able to see what their abilities and strengths are instantaneously.
I also recently read through Stack Overflow’s 2017 developer survey and they looked at the job search status amongst software developers. They found out that while only 13.1% of developers are actively looking for a job, a whopping 75.2% are interested in learning of new opportunities and the most common way that these engineers found opportunities was through networking. This means through a friend, a family member, or a former colleague. For me, there exists an intimacy of knowing an engineer’s abilities with the networking that ultimately lands them their next job. Again, this information is out there, structured and readable!
Secondly, after talking to many other SWEs and industry people, I’m happy to see there is a general excitement on surfacing this information somehow. One recurring comment that I’ve been hearing is “we (software engineers) need our own LinkedIn”. After digging deeper on what this actually means, have come away with the conclusion that existing profiles for software engineers could be much better. The fact is that the traditional resume format doesn’t fit a developer’s specific needs. Software engineers are more than a list of places they’ve worked. I’m pondering what this exactly means from an exact product perspective but perhaps this inefficiency of current profiles/resumes combined with the availability of this structured data out there could mean something really special.
Finally, the engineering market is quickly growing at an incredible pace. Recent statistics from Evans Data Corp. has there being 3.6M software engineers in the US alone and 18.2M worldwide, with there projected to be over 26.4M worldwide by next year, a 45% increase. The advent of code academies, computer science university degrees, the app economy and hackers are all contributing to this insane popularity.
In conjunction, The United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is citing that the employment of software developers is projected to grow 17 percent from 2014 to 2024 vs the average of 7% for all other occupations. The main reason for the rapid growth is a large increase in the demand for computer software.
Exciting times!
I’ve been toying around with several ideas around this notion and have co-founded sourcerer.io to bring this idea to reality. I will be cataloging my thoughts here and collecting feedback as we progress and hope to build out something truly unique and valuable for software engineers, people like myself.
More to come and I hope you can continue to follow me on this journey of mine.
