Interesting Data Gigs # 17: Just take my advice and join Sourcegraph

One of the companies with the biggest potential I've ever seen this decade

October 29, 2022

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Hello Data geek.

Today, I won’t be writing about a specific role.

Today, I want to present to you one of the most interesting companies I’ve seen this decade, and I hope when you finish reading this, go visit their careers page and apply for a role there.

The company is called Sourcegraph, and I will tell you why you should be part of this team.

First things first: What is Sourcegraph?

The simplest definition I’ve found about the company is this video from Marek Zaluski, a Software Engineer at Sourcegraph focused on the Developer experience:

I just took a small piece here:

What is Sourcegraph? Sourcegraph is a code search engine that runs in the browser.

It's also a code intelligence platform that helps you understand your code. 

Sourcegraph is also accessible with a command line client, and it's also accessible via editor extensions so that you can use it from within your existing workflow.

Now, Sourcegraph has three search modes, literal search, regular expressions, and structural search. These help you match results in different ways depending on what you're looking for.

Sourcegraph also offers code intelligence. This means finding references and go-to-definition functionality, commit message search, diff search, which means searching for matches that were added or removed in any committed diff, symbol search, and branch search.

That means searching on any given branch and not just the default branch of your repository.

Now, use cases. 

What do developers use Sourcegraph for? Typically, developers use Sourcegraph for five key use cases.

1/ First, finding and fixing vulnerabilities. So, finding which of your dependencies are affected by a dependency vulnerability, for example.

2/ Next, accelerating developer onboarding for new team members. This means allowing new developers to answer their own questions by being able to search and browse all of the code, helping them ramp up and get productive with the codebase faster.

3/ Next, resolving incidents faster. So, searching over recent changes to the code to find out what change might have caused an issue or a regression, for example.

4/ And finally, code reuse. When you can search quickly over all of your existing code, it's easier to avoid reinventing code and that leads to more consistent and more efficient coding practices.

So in conclusion of this first unit, Sourcegraph is a code search and code intelligence platform that allows you to find all of your company's code in the browser in order to make your work easier and more efficient.

Truly this makes the perfect description for the platform.

But there is more.

They are hiring remotely

Sourcegraph is hiring remotely in almost all countries out there. So they are intentionally hiring people from different parts of the world, different cultures, time zones, mindsets, etc. This makes the company even more attractive.

BTW: they are doing everything in public sight: the handbook is public, the company’s strategy, the compensation, OKRs, everything is there.

It’s like they shared:

As part of making Sourcegraph open source, we build Sourcegraph with a public (strategy and issues). As an open product, and open company, our website and documentation is now open source which holds product- and company-related docs.

So, I want to share with you the first idea of how to stand out in your job application. It’s very simple, but you should know that many people won’t do this:

Take your time and read it, take your notes and bring your own questions to the virtual meeting with them.

For example: to probe that I read it, in order to this research, I saw that Sourcegraph is using Rippling’s services to pay its employees

So, if I took the time to do it, you must do it as well if you want to be part of this org.

The company is well-funded

For myself, in the current environment we are facing now, I don’t care a lot about funding (I care more about profits and sane growth) but you should know that Sourcegraph is well funded: $248 Million in seven different rounds, according to Crunchbase’s data.

The last raising was a $150 Million Series D for a valuation of $2.625 Billion, with a16z, Craft Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Infinitum Partners, and many other incredible investors working directly with this team. To be honest with you: the capital is important but here what matters most, at least from my perspective is to work closely with incredible investors like David Sacks, Sarah Wang, Andrew Reed, Scott Raney, and many more.

The community matters more than you think

They are just putting a lot of effort into building an incredible product, but to build an amazing community as well on Discord. I’m part of this incredible community to the point that I was very active on Twitter (I’m still sharing tidbits about the product and its capabilities almost every 3 days) and they sent me this incredible swag package to my home here in Lima:

Thank you, Justin and Beyang for that

Social Proof Sells

They are currently working with big engineering powerhouses like Cloudflare, HashiCorp, Yelp, Plaid, and Nutanix, which says a lot about the quality of the products and services they are providing.

David Haynes, a Security Engineer at Cloudflare, shared this about the product:

So, when you see this caliber of clients that Sourcegraph is working with, you immediately understand that the company is providing a ton of value to these companies.

It’s time to be part of this rocketship, my friend.

Let’s discuss two ideas on how to approach this job application (THE REAL MEAT)

Idea # 1: READ THE HANDBOOK

This is too important to let it pass. Everything is there, even its productivity hacks.

Idea # 2: Win Twitter as a client and help Elon and his Tesla peers to understand Twitter codebase faster

Actually, I shared this today:

I know: this will be hard, especially with the current situation of the company, but it’s not a so crazy idea after all.

Elon demanded to every developer on Twitter to print out all the code they delivered in the past 30 to 60 days.

Here’s an example:

Can you imagine just for a second how many paper sheets will need the team for this?

There is a faster, cleaner, and environment-friendly way to do this: just use Sourcegraph’s capabilities, especially Code Insights. 

The big proposal here is simply saving a ton of time, not only for the developers trying to understand the code but for Product Managers as well.

This post from Eric Brody-Moore and Joel Kwartler explained in a remarkable way how non-technical people can benefit from a product like Sourcegraph.

But, how to accomplish this? 

Two key things: David Sacks and a short Loom video (affiliate) explaining how to use the product with a Twitter’s public repository, like Finatra or rustcommon for example.

Why Sacks? Because he is a friend of Elon and he could help (I’m speculating here, not assuming) to make the connection.

Then, perhaps Quinn, Beyang, and Marek could work on a short video (less than 5 minutes) explaining how Sourcegraph could help Twitter, using one of these repositories of the company.

A very concise and direct-to-the-point video. Perhaps you could ask Parker Conrad (CEO of Rippling) how he did it when he was pitching Rippling to investors:

Perhaps this could be the path for the next Head of Marketing at Sourcegraph. Who knows !!!

BTW: if you are applying for this particular role, please join this community of Product-Led Growth practitioners here, ask for an intro to Wes Bush, buy his book and join the Slack community.

Idea # 3: Just apply my friend

Do it now, and if you get the chance to be on board this space cruiser, don’t think too much. Just join.

Good luck with the application.

Other jobs in the Interesting Data Gigs Jobs Board

Just remember that you can be part of our Talent Collective here, and put your profile in front of dozens of companies actively hiring here.

And if you are a company looking for potential candidates, ready for interviews, you can join here as a company.

We have 13 active candidates in our Talent Collective right now:

Interesting resources of the week

Final words

Some of you have asked me directly if there is a way you could support my work. This is a perfect way that I found.

It’s that simple: If your company is hiring new Data Analytics people, share the link to the Talent Collective with them, or if you know someone who is actively looking for this kind of role, feel free to send it as well.

I will be forever grateful to you if you take some time to do that.

Thank you, and see you in the next issue,

Marcos out.

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