“Open source tools help you to leverage on other people’s expertise”

Looking for an engineering job? Open source technology can make your journey easier, says Mike Pyle, senior vice president, Engineering, Pegasystems Inc. Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You caught up with Mike during Pegasystem’s developers’ conferenc

— Mike Pyle, senior vice president, Engineering, Pega Systems Inc.

Q How does Pegasystems use open source technology?

We like the concept of open source technology, and we use a lot of open source to make our products. We don’t produce open source technology. So we don’t make products and put them in the public domain, but we do use a lot of open source technology and are a part of quite a few projects as well. We have recently acquired Antenna, which contributed to a European Union initiative to create open source components for the mobile world. So, in a nutshell, we do use a lot of open source elements in our product.

Q What kind of development processes do you have at Pega India?

We have the same development processes being followed in various Pega branches worldwide and India is no exception. We use AJA and SCRUM in particular. Some elements of AJA are tested and designed with respect to programming, but we adopted SCRUM as the primary vehicle for moving forward the development processes at Pega. We did this adoption of technology four-five years ago. Before that, I think we did not have much development of technology. When I joined Pega, the company had around 20 people and our engineering organisation had about 10 people. Our development methodology depended immensely on the traditional process of bringing people into the room, doing things on the white board, and then people returning to their desks to write the code. It was a very small development team.

If you look at the growth of Pega, it was very slow for at least the first 15 years. Most of our accelerated growth has happened in the past 10-12 years. We deliberately tried to shift from being an applications company to being a platform company. Our investments in R&D have been accelerating. As we grow bigger and as we grow more distributed around the world, we decided that we needed a methodology to give us some discipline.

While evaluating the development technologies at

“Open source technology gives us the benefit of other people’s investments. In my mind, the whole principle of open source is that we have a lot of talented people who really have a passion for improving the products they are working on.”

Pega, we looked at different things and SCRUM really impressed me for a few reasons. One is that it is very intuitive. You don’t have to wait for the project to complete to see the results of it. SCRUM divides everything into managed books and you can review your work at the end of each sprint. You can accordingly change direction and learn from it. The other thing about SCRUM is that it is a fairly lightweight process.

Q How important is open source technology for development at Pega?

Open source technology is a very important part of development processes in Pega. The plain logic of it is—if something is already available, why not use it rather than build that yourself. For instance, the Apache Foundation has a lot of things that we use in the development world or fit in different things. We believe in the open source vision of Big Data and we use Lucene as our search engine. In all, we have incorporated lots and lots of such components and adopted them in our day-to-day development. One of the things that is a part of our release process is that we scan all of our code, identify all the open source components, and make sure that we are complying with all the licences. I think it is a couple of hundred open source components that we use while developing at Pega.

Q What exactly are your reasons for using open source technology?

Open source technology gives us the benefit of other people’s investments. In my mind, the whole principle of open source is that we have a lot of talented people who really have a passion for improving the products they are working on. There’s a community that is probably much larger, which works on products that we could deploy. We focus on what we can do best, and leverage the ‘best of breed’ of other people who are focusing on what they do best.

Q Doesn’t cost play a role when you consider open source technology?

Probably not, and let me tell you why this is the case for us. It is important to us that whatever technology we use is really solid and does what we need to do, because our customers are the biggest and most successful organisations across the globe. We have a very high-end target and user base. The top banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies and health care service providers cannot compromise on their technology, which is primarily provided by us. So I can confidently say that we don’t use open source technology to save money but we use it to improve our product. We, for sure, know that we have a good product and people buy it, and it commands a premium price. So we would never settle for anything less than the best available, and open source technology surely offers some of the best choices for us. People often ask me why we have such a big development facility in India and whether we came here to save money. The answer is ‘No’; we are not here to save money. The reason we came to India is because I noticed that there are a lot of people from India who worked for us in the US. And they are really, really good people. I noticed that some of them were starting to say that they wanted to go back because India was reaching a stage where people could have a good lifestyle and career. They wanted to be a part of contributing to the home country’s economy.

Then we thought that if they are planning to go back, there must be other people from the industry with similar plans. That got me interested in the idea that India has a lot of very talented people. I came here first in 2002 and met a lot of people, and made up my mind about setting up a facility here. When we began six years ago, we started with the idea that we will take only top engineers. We did not want to compromise because we did not come here to save money, but because we think there’s some great talent here and we wanted to gain access to that.

Initially, we thought of hiring 40 great engineers to get the ball rolling. When we actually started the recruitment process, we realised that there is a lot of really awesome talent in the country and we started tapping into the talent pool. So we came here not for the low cost. We came here for high quality.

The same thing applies to our working with open source. It’s not about cost savings, but about high quality.

Q So, do you find the right kind of open source skillsets in engineers in India?

A bunch of our engineers are very interested in the open source community and in keeping abreast with the best of technology, in general, and we encourage them to do that. A lot of them contribute to various open source projects. They mostly do that in their own time. If at all they need access to some of our resources and they need time to work on things, we kind of encourage them to do that. One of the things that we do at Pega is that we have hackathons almost once in each quarter at each of our locations. In the US, we do it the classic way that a hackathon is conducted —where people start working on one noon and only stop working the following noon. They stay up all night and organise themselves into teams to arrange for their food

or whatever they need. That is a big show of talent. A lot of ideas that go into these hackathons actually come from open source, where people find some tool or some piece of software and build a prototype that shows how that software can be leveraged to make our products.

In India, we don’t do a 24-hour event, but what we do is tell people to work on something that they find worthy of their time. We term it as Pega Innovations, where we evaluate the projects that people work on and we award them too. We use that piece of innovation in our product as well, if the need be. We do similar such events in other parts of the world at different Pega facilities as well.

Q Do you see enough drive in the Indian engineers to contribute to open source technology compared to what you see in the US?

I think so. Actually, it varies from person to person rather than being determined by geographies. There are some people who are really passionate about contributing code to a project, while there are others who take it a bit casually. The engineers who have a passion for engineering look for every opportunity to get involved in something that is innovative and interesting. You can find such engineers everywhere. Our Amsterdam team is probably more active than any other team in contributing to open source projects, but we have a good population of people in India as well, who are actively participating in open source projects.

Q Do you think that the demand for engineers with open source technology skills is increasing over a period of time because of more widespread adoption?

Frankly, this is not something that I have given much thought to. We don’t actively ask people about their experiences in open source technology. It is not one of the criteria that we consider. When we hire at Pega, we hire for aptitude and commitment. We like to take energetic people on board who love what they do. If we are able to find such people, they can always learn the technologies we work on. My guess though, is that the open source community has come out of being seen as weird. For a while, I think everybody thought that it was a bit strange, but we have a lot of customers who run their operations on Linux. For instance, Postgres is now becoming a very popular database. We did support Postgres in the last two years, as we thought it was something that would become really important. Mainstream corporations are now adopting these technologies, whereas 10 years ago, I think everyone was very sceptical. And this has opened more doors for people contributing to open source technologies.

Q Are your customers open to adopting solutions based on open source technology?

I have seen a huge change in the mindset of my customers for open source technology over a period of time. Linux is now respectable, though it wasn’t so earlier. A lot of our customers run JBoss with TomCat and they have a lot of interest in Postgres.

Q How do FOSS tools add value to the development process?

Tools help you get things done faster and better. And with open source components, you don’t have to build stuff. You can leverage other people’s expertise and focus on more important areas. It also improves the pace of development.

Q If I am a developer who wishes to be hired at Pega, on what basis would I be evaluated?

Everyone has to undergo a set process. As I said, we will first test your aptitude. We also run Open Days. People hear about it and come in. These Open Days are like walk- in interviews and we have them on most weekends. People come in and we show them a video of who we are, what we do, what our vision is and what our technology does, so that they have some understanding. Then we ask them to take a standard online test. Some part of the test comprises just technology questions, about databases, Java, Java Script, HTML, CSS and some of the other basic technologies.

A lot of the questions involve problem solving, where we look for people’s aptitude. Here we test how the candidates think and whether they can think the way we do. It is not about how many correct answers you have given, but it is about the type of questions people dwell on. It tells us about the potential cultural fit and also the areas in Pega where they can fit in well, because we have different requirements for different disciplines. We then pick some people that we are interested in, and they have to undergo some personal interviews for the final recruitment. The interviews are conducted by two to three people from the engineering team, who ask candidates to explain things that they have worked on, ask them some ‘what if’ type questions and enquire about their interests. This tells us whether they will fit into the culture of the company or not, and then we make the decision.

Q Do you think certifications help in getting a job, particularly in a company like Pega?

Yes. If a candidate has certifications in any of the technologies that we use a lot, they are a great indication that somebody really does have the knowledge of the subject. As a company, we really promote certifications. So, all of the partner staff get certifications in Pega technologies like Certified System Architect, Certified Senior System Architect, Certified Lead System Architect, all of which are progressively advanced qualifications. We tell our customers that when they are hiring staff, they should look for certifications. This is something we very much believe in as a cultural thing at Pega.