Category: Enterprise Developers

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Enterprise Developers Interviews

Meet the Enterprise Developers – Interview Series #2: The data storage & processing sector

You might have heard the term “Enterprise Developer” buzzing around, especially in communities like Developer Nation. It generally points to professionals who work in larger teams or organizations that focus on creating high-level software.

Our second interview features an Enterprise Developer from the data storage & processing sector, who we’ll call Dev B to keep things confidential. Despite the anonymity, Dev B shares valuable insights into this fascinating domain. Stay tuned for more conversations as we continue to uncover the world of Enterprise Developers.

Discovering the Role

Q: Can you briefly describe your Job as an Enterprise Software Developer?

Dev B: Someone who works in the data availability and replication domain on multi-cluster distributed systems.

Challenges and Benefits of Company Size

Q: What are some of the challenges and benefits of working at a large company compared to a start-up?

Dev B: Stable environment where the company can afford you to train on their systems as compared to directly jumping on projects and work as soon as you join a startup

Seeking Collaboration

Q: If you could change one thing about how your organisation operates, what would it be?

Dev B: More team collaborations across different projects. 

Collaboration is the lifeblood of innovation, and Dev B sees room for improvement in this aspect within his organization. He envisions more collaborative efforts across various projects. 

AI’s Subtle Impact

Q: How is AI impacting your day-to-day life? Is there a policy regarding the use of AI tools in your company?

Dev B: AI for me is a means to quickly look up effective/optimal ways of solving trivial programming-related queries.

Artificial Intelligence is a buzzword that’s transforming industries worldwide. For Dev B, AI serves as a tool to swiftly find optimal solutions to programming queries. It’s a way to streamline and enhance the programming process by quickly identifying effective problem-solving approaches.

The Tools That Shape the Craft

Big organisations often have customised in-house tools tailored to their specific needs which though having a learning curve can get the work done more efficiently.

On the other hand 3rd party or open-source tools provide an alternative where you’ll find a ton of support, documentation and use case but you’ll have to adapt it for your specific needs

Q: How much of your work depends on specific tools, frameworks, programming languages or cloud providers?

Dev B: Mostly internal frameworks and the majority of C++ and c programming language.

In the world of software development, tools, frameworks, programming languages, and cloud providers define the landscape. For Dev B, internal frameworks take centre stage, with a predominant use of C++ and C programming languages. These are the tools that allow him to bring complex systems to life.

In this insightful interview series, we’ve delved into the world of Enterprise Developers, uncovering their unique roles and perspectives. Through our conversation with Dev B, an Enterprise Developer in the data storage and processing sector, we’ve gained valuable insights into the challenges, benefits, and dynamics of this domain. 

The importance of collaboration, the subtle impact of AI, and the instrumental role of specific tools and languages have come to the forefront. As we continue our journey to explore more Enterprise Developers’ stories, we look forward to unravelling the intricacies that shape the software development landscape. Stay tuned for more conversations that shed light on this fascinating realm. 

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Community Enterprise Developers

Meet the Enterprise Developers – Interview Series #1:  Investment Sector 

Enterprise Developers - Who are they 1

The term Enterprise Developer has been showing up quite frequently over the past few years in Developer Nation and other programming communities. In our experience, this term can have slightly varied meanings, but it often relates to the Developers working in big teams/organisations, supporting enterprise-grade software development. 

To shape a more accurate definition and learn more about Enterprise Developers’ roles, responsibilities, and challenges, we decided to ask them directly. Hence, starting this new series of blog Interviews at Developer Nation, talking with Enterprise Developers, giving our community more clarity about their work and how it differs from a startup environment.

The first interviewee in this series has requested us to keep their identity anonymous; hence respecting their privacy, we will call them Dev A.

Ayan: Can you briefly describe your job as an Enterprise Software Developer

Dev A: I work as a Software Developer at an investment firm, my work revolves around writing tools and data pipelines that help traders/operations and also data pipelines that run during and pre/post trading.

Dev A has briefly described their work as building tools and data pipelines that help investors trade on the platform. 

A data pipeline is a function that processes raw data from various data sources and then posts it to a data warehouse for further analysis.

Ayan: What are some of the challenges and benefits of working at a large company compared to a startup?

Dev A: Challenges – a lot of existing infra to go through and gain understanding on. Slow review and deployment process, lot of stakeholders.

Benefits – Learn about processes, scalable solutions, how large infra is maintained. You get a hang of good practices.

Processes make it easier for developers to work and support each other in a big team setup. However, these processes can also sometimes  become bottlenecks when new features of patches in the code need to be shipped to the production. As Dev A mentioned, the review and deployment process is slow, and many stakeholders are there whose reviews are needed. On the good side, these processes ensure the quality of the code having it being reviewed by multiple parties. Especially in financial organisations a bug showing an incorrect balance can be a disaster for the product. 

Ayan: If you could change one thing about how your organization operates, what would it be?

Dev A:  n/a

I asked Dev A if there’s anything they would want to change about the way their organization operates. Apparently there isn’t anything that is rare but good to know. 

Ayan: How is AI impacting your day-to-day life? Is there a policy regarding the use of AI tools in your company?

Dev A: Not allowed to enter proprietary information in LLMs. Consider anything entered into ChatGPT is as good as posting it on social media.

AI helps generate quick commands for generic things – e.g bash commands, generate snippets, etc. Stack overflow replacement in a crude way.

From the response, Dev A’s org seems to have a strict policy when it comes to using Large Language Models like ChatGPT with any proprietary information. However, Dev A has been using it to support their development work, like generating Bash commands or code snippets to automate aspects of their job, using it as a Stack Overflow replacement – Very Interesting. 

Ayan: How much of your work depends on specific tools, frameworks, programming languages, or cloud providers?

Dev A : Many libraries are inbuilt and maintained in-house, but many are used from outside as well. e.g redis, github etc.

This one is a classic. To be easily maintainable a big software project is usually organised into libraries, which are easier to maintain and reuse in different projects. As Dev A mentioned, many libraries are built and maintained within the org itself. However, like any other software product, they also depend on other work in open source and outside to support the product development. 

That was all from this interview, but keep an eye out for more. If you know anyone we should invite for this kind of interview session, please feel free to write me at ayan.pahwa@slashdata.co

Ayan