Navigating Leadership and Compensation in Tech

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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!

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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

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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

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References and Transcript:

See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast

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