Guest: Justin Hartung (LinkedIn)
Company: Qarik Group (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

Justin Hartung, partner at Qarik Group, predicts the emergence of ‘big code’, where a lot of companies use something like big data to unlock different silos of data in the organization. “We’re starting to see something very similar with source code at companies where companies may have 40,000 different repos across their organization, where all their software assets are tied,” shares Hartung. He also says that more and more companies are going to increase focus on developer productivity. Hartung goes on to add that companies that are addressing security through automation are starting to see a return on investment, unlike other companies that just focus on security as an afterthought. Check out the video above to know what else Hartung is predicting for 2022.

[expander_maker] 

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya, and welcome to our 2022 predictions series. Today we have with us, once again, Justin Hartung, partner at Qarik Group, Justin is great to have you on the show.

Justin Hartung: Well, thank you Swapnil, it’s great to be here.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Of course, we will be talking about your predictions, but before I ask you to pick up your crystal ball, please quickly tell us what Qarik Group is all about?

Justin Hartung: Sure. Qarik Group is really a company that we’re helping a lot of other companies make the transition to a digital native organization. So we bring world class capabilities and what it means to really adopt technologies like what Google uses so they could help themselves move forward in the industry.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Nice time for you to grab your crystal ball and share with us what predictions you have for this year.

Justin Hartung: Wonderful. Well, thank you. So I do have a few different predictions and they’re kind of related to another. The first one is for lack of a better term, I’ll call it the emergence of something, we’ll call it big code, where a lot of companies use something like big data to unlock different silos of data in the organization. We’re starting to see something very similar with source code at companies where companies may have 40,000 different repos across their organization, where all their software assets are tied.

We’re starting to see more and more enterprises move to something like a monorepo and live tooling allows them to treat all their code as one unified asset, and that can help them unlock value in their source code in ways they didn’t think possible. But more importantly, it also allows them to coordinate and to orchestrate releases in a lot more sophisticated method.

My second prediction is around developer productivity. And it’s not so much how we measure how effective developers are, but rather the effort that companies are putting into how their employees or their developers are able to be creative. And a lot of companies have realized, especially in the great resignation, that it’s more than just a paycheck that will keep and attract high quality talented engineers. But it’s really are they able to do what they signed up and what interested them in computer science in the first place, which is tackle very interesting problems.

Now, all too often in large general enterprises, there’s a lot of bureaucracy put in the way of developers being able to go create and go from the business idea to outcomes. And so as we see in the industry, the high performing companies spend about 15% of their effort on developer productivity, but there’s very few companies that actually do that. So we’re starting to see this emergence in developer productivity.

The third prediction is around security. And this is of course, probably everyone you’ve talked to has the prediction around security because it’s been such a hot topic issue with the increased vulnerabilities or the different security threats that people are seeing.

But I think that this is kind of related to number two, which is companies that are addressing security through automation are starting to see really a return on investment that other companies that just focus on security as an afterthought are not seen. And this is almost creating a digital divide between like when you start creating the systems for automation, it’s much easier to secure them because there’s consistency, there’s visibility, there’s transparency. And without those, you can never have a culture of constantly improving. And so companies that invest in security in a proactive way are starting to see the return on that investment.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing this predictions. Now, what is going to be the focus of the company in 2022?

Justin Hartung: Sure. So our focus, of course, we have in the same focus on quality and we want to hire world class engineers and bring them with very interesting projects. But 2022 is really a year more of creating a scaled platform. I think last time we talked, we were probably at 50 or so or 60 people. We just passed a 100 people. And so we’re rapidly growing. I anticipate this time next year, we’ll probably be about 300 people.

And so with that kind of growth, there’s a lot of concerns that I have. First one, is we can’t just use manual systems. We want to make sure we create an environment that enables people to do great things.

But more importantly than that is we want to keep the high bar for quality. And that’s not just the client deliverable, but also the quality of our culture so that every person we bring on is increasing our culture, increasing our ability to deliver great outcomes.

And if we’re not meeting those high bars, then we’re going to say no to clients, and we’re not going to take on more work because it’s our number one priority, is prioritizing people. So that ultimately is really our… To me I see 2022 as that year of building those scaled platforms that allows us to grow.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Justin, thank you so much for joining me today to share not only these predictions, but also the focus of the company. And once again, give us a quick recap, what Qarik Group is all about. Thanks for your time today. And I look forward to our next discussion. Thank you.

Justin Hartung: Thank you, Swapnil, always a pleasure.

[/expander_maker]