XM Knowledge Base
Insights
The Language of Tech: Coding Languages at Qualtrics
Earlier this year we were asked by BuiltIn Seattle: what are the best coding languages for a tech professional to focus on learning?
The situation at Qualtrics is fairly unique when it comes to coding skills, so we turned to Anderson Quach, Senior Director of Software Engineering, to give us his insight. To see the rest of this article, explore the entire piece over at BuiltIn Seattle.
The Qualtrics engineering team doesn’t base their programming language choices on popularity alone. Senior Director of Software Engineering Anderson Quach said that he evaluates his team’s existing skillset as it relates to community support for any languages they consider employing.
In the job market, which languages are hot right now?
When it comes to full-stack and application work, we look for TypeScript/JavaScript libraries with great community support, like React, as well as those with cross-platform runtimes, like Node.js. For back-end solutions, Golang, Java, and Scala are solid. And for machine learning/artificial intelligence workloads, we like TensorFlow.
These languages can be deployed rapidly and iteratively, delivering innovations that are high-quality, scalable, and secure with minimal go-to-market time. Qualtrics is focused on bringing products and services that are loosely coupled in a microservices architecture. So the languages we choose help to facilitate our need for flexibility while allowing rapid adoption of new technical stacks. In other words, we focus on finding languages that deliver the right solution for specific problems.
We don’t look for specific languages on resumes. Rather, we’re interested in candidates who have strong computer science and programming fundamental knowledge with a genuine curiosity and love for learning and personal growth.
What’s a programming language you're not currently working with that you'd like to, and why?
We’re constantly evaluating the advantages of new languages. We’ve been very deliberate about the languages we have chosen so far. We start by looking at both the skill set of our engineering team and the public community that supports the language, including libraries and runtime. We think through a high-level set of selection and supportability criteria and we evaluate how well the supporting libraries and frameworks can help us accelerate toward solving the problem at hand. We’re always open to new languages that will help propel our next innovation.
Building at Qualtrics requires a wide range of skills and results in opportunities to develop those skills in different ways every day. You can learn more from our Engineers on why they have chosen to bring their talents to Qualtrics by exploring more on the Qualtrics Life blog. And if you want to read more directly from our Engineering team then check out Stacks & Q’s.