FULL-STACK DEVELOPERS ARE THE MOST IN DEMAND IN 2020 TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE

Though the qualities that define a full-stack

100 5.2%
7.4%
5.3% 5.4% 6.2% 5.4%
8.3% QA engineer
developer are a subject of debate, most agree AI-powered job recommendation
7.9% 9.0% 10.2% that they should have a basic understanding
What’s
10.9%
13.0%
10.3%
14.9%
8.1%
15.1%
8.5%
17.8%
9.9%
14.8%
DevOps engineer (or better) of all layers of a tech stack,
and should be able to generate
O ne of the biggest problems
plaguing the global
recruitment industry is
various professional and
personal factors to recommend
highly relevant job
the most Front-end developer a minimum viable product on
matching people to the right opportunities at the right time.
important role 20.1% 27.7% 28.0%
21.2% 24.0% Data scientist their own. It’s why they are
opportunities. There are two The key here is accuracy and
you’re looking especially important in small
parts to this problem – timing – a person has to be
Back-end developer organisations, where fewer
to fill in 2020? competency matching and both willing and interested to
43.4% 33.9% 34.3% 36.2% 37.6% employees often have to do
Full-stack developer interest matching. While make a change at that point in
the job of many
0 competency matching has been time and their skills should
Company employee strength 1-49 50-999 1,000-9,999 10,000+ Total Source: 2020 HackerRank Developer Skills Report solved to an extent, what match the role. Building such
remains challenging is an engine will be complex

Why full-stack developers are

to identify who is because of the nature,
most likely to be quantum and quality of
interested in a data it has to analyse. In a
specific role. world that is increasingly
I would like to see being reshaped by AI, a

hot, and why that helps polyglots

an AI-powered technology like this will be
engine that a powerful way to
analyses a connect
person people with
basis opportunities
they deserve.
end (usually written on HTML,
They help to roll out It’s great to be a polyglot. But when you learn multiple CSS, JavaScript). If you want to
Sachin Gupta | CEO & FOUNDER, HACKEREARTH

new software and programming languages, it is more useful when one

language complements the other. For example, in data
make a simple change to any of
these stacks, you need to have the
updates faster, but science, if Python is used to analyse datasets and build
prototypes, the final code for the production environment will
knowledge of at least three lan-
guages,” says Ravuri.
they also need to be have to be written in either Scala, Java or similar languages. Most Startups, given limited re-
constantly learning data scientists can get away with knowing just Python or R very
well, if their work is restricted to just exploration.
sources, love full-stack engineers
because they then need to hire
Habeeba Salim & Shilpa Phadnis | TNN If they want to do more within the production fewer people. But startups, by re-
environment or scaling or escalation of leasing features faster, are putting

T
he tech world now belongs
to full-stack developers.
HackerRank Developer
Skills Report 2020 is just out, and
the skills assessment company
says that full-stack developers are
the most in-demand talent pool for
2020 (see top panel graphic).
Of the hiring managers inter-
viewed, 38% said full-stack devel-
opers is the top role to fill in 2020.
The demand for full-stack develop-
ers was expressed most by small
companies (1-49 employees), 43%
issues, they need to know another language. pressure on the big firms to do the
The second language will enable them to same. So the big firms too are now
quickly write their own code to consume the beginning to hire more full-stack
data and contribute to analysis at production engineers.
scale levels. That sure brings a lot of If you have been in the tech
independence at work industry for a long time, it is high-
Shantanu Bhattacharyya | SENIOR DATA ly likely that you know multiple
SCIENTIST, LOCUS, A TECH PLATFORM languages. “A person starts an IT
OPTIMISING LOGISTICS
career with a single language,
with a single area of development.
Full-stack software engineers If he wants to expand his knowl-
If you are good at one language, you will be edge base, he will have to move to
are needed to build out faster in picking up other languages. And
online products and services. another area of development and,
always, a polyglot is preferred over others by default, learn a new language,”

of which ranked the role as their
top priority.
Full-stack developers are soft-
ware engineers who can work
Focus on social
The basic premise is to understand because they will be more useful to the team and they
that software languages and says Madhavrao Pachupate, senior
can play multiple roles. Having cloud and DevOps skills director of technology at IT & con-
frameworks (any boilerplate plug and are almost becoming mandatory; they are no longer
play piece of code customised as per sulting firm Synechron.
additional skills The all-rounder role comes

through all layers of an application
— the database, middle layer and
user interface. The increasing de-
mand for a full-stack engineer can
science in school
need, making software development
faster) change with time and the Rakesh Ravuri | CTO & SVP ENGINEERING AND GLOBAL RETAIL with challenges. There is a con-
majority of the technologies make use ENGINEERING LEAD, PUBLICIS SAPIENT stant need to evaluate, learn, and
of similar underlying concepts. In apply what is learnt. According to
the HackerRank report, full-stack

be associated with the desire for
companies to rollout updates faster,
since one person can do it all. But
the larger picture that mustn’t be
missed is that of the evolution of
the role of a developer.
to do well in CS
order to be a good full-stack engineer, A full-stack developer equates to a T-shaped engineer. T-shaped
one must clearly grasp engineers are expected to have context and knowledge for the developers are required to learn
these fundamental breadth of technologies used throughout an new skills most often – 60% of
concepts. This allows organisation while having expertise in certain areas. them learned a completely new
them to quickly pick up The demand for full-stack developers comes from the framework or platform in the last
any new technology desire of organisations to have engineers with year – more than any other role Arpita.Misra@timesgroup.com
and make technology enough breadth to design and troubleshoot polled. Full-stack developers also GROW YOUR SKILL SET

Not long ago, there used to be
specialists working on different
pieces of technology. Then came
a host of advances, including
cloud, DevOps and more robust
hardware, which made many spe-
cialist tasks redundant. “There
are a lot of building blocks today
that have made things much eas-
ier,” says Rakesh Ravuri, CTO &
SVP of engineering at Publicis
Sapient. The building blocks in-
clude technologies for setting up
a server (it can be just a click away
if you are using a cloud) or a da-
tabase (which too is just a click
away thanks to cloud service pro-
Schneider Electric
related decisions with
the correct conscious
trade-offs
Divyam Goel | CEO &
CO-FOUNDER, ATTAINU,
ONLINE LEARNING
PLATFORM
viders) and pre-packaged contain-
ers (for software deployment).
“These have taken things to a
level where you need fewer people
to do a project,” says Ravuri.
Since many things have now
been automated and pre-built, an
enterprising developer can learn
A
technologies within a complex and changing have to learn the most languages: sound understanding of
45% reported that they had to pick social sciences can help Having a small set of
ecosystem. Both full-stack development and
up a new one within the last year. cement a career in com- skills may not be enough,
knowing multiple technologies allow engineers to
better understand and solve problems by “Knowing multiple languages puter science (CS), says Niloy as it may quickly become
evaluating them from multiple perspectives and frameworks help engineers Ganguly, professor in the de- obsolete. A good hold
learn patterns that they can lever- partment of computer science on basic
Teresa Dietrich | CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER,
age in quickly understanding new at IIT-Kharagpur. Without deep CS is very
STACKOVERFLOW technologies and to choose the one knowledge about society and important
to solve the problem they are fac- sociology, he says, a technical
for survival
enough to do an entire project her- of a website. Websites are written ing. With the current pace of person will find it difficult to
self. That is the real origin of the in JavaScript. Backends are gener- change and increasingly large even define problems, because
in the long
term full-stack developer. ally written in a different lan- number of technology options, the definitions are more in the run. Also,
A full-stack developer, however, guage (Python, Golang, PhP, Java, engineers are constantly evaluat- social context. don’t have the
would generally need to be a poly- Perl, C++). Then you have the ing and adopting new technolo- “Technology cannot be built illusion that you would be
glot, one who is passionate about database (to which you communi- gies,” says Teresa Dietrich, chief without empathy and empathy able to survive your
learning multiple programming cate via the language in which the product officer at online developer can come only from knowledge. entire life only
languages. “Consider the example backend is built), and the front platform StackOverflow. A computer scientist today has on some university-
to understand social concepts. acquired skills
So it’s important that students
FRESHERS FILE TRADE SECRETS AT WESTERN DIGITAL
Western Digital – the company that makes storage solutions, including the SanDisk memory
cards that many of us use – gets freshers (New College Graduates - NCGs) to file trade
take extra care to learn their
social science lessons in
school,” he says.
At IIT-Kharagpur, a recently-
DIGITAL DIVIDE
Unlike popular perception,
there are a lot of students

is creating micro
secrets/ patents within a year or two of joining. That’s incredible. Supria Dhanda, country introduced subject that has who come to IIT from
manager at Western Digital India, says it’s the result of multiple programmes. The drawn a lot of attention is AI challenged backgrounds.
flagship programme is called Independently Productive Program (IPP) and has been and Ethics, which emphasises
They may be exceptionally
in implementation for the last six years. This year will see the seventh batch. It’s a four

data centres in India

brilliant, but don’t have the
week intensive boot camp followed by functional training programmes for the next three HEAR THE PROF necessary exposure. This
to six months. IPP, Dhanda says, motivates the engineers to assume greater leadership
and ownership of projects. “This programme – together with others like Data Innovation Bazaar, an array of social factors. “The gets reflected in the first-
Hackathons and Inventor Recognition Events – is the reason we have one of the largest number of NCGs course covers various ethical year computer science
Akhil.George@timesgroup.com actively contributing to building products and a strong portfolio of intellectual property,” says Dhanda issues arising out of the appli- course, where we find a
THIRD LARGEST cation of AI. It covers algorithm bimodal distribution – some

D
ata centres tend now to be
these large, centralised fa-
cilities in select regions. But
that has limitations. The further
the data centre is from you, the
higher the latency – the time taken
for the data to reach you.
As Pankaj Sharma, executive
vice president of the secure power
division at Schneider Electric, says,
Netflix customers in small cities
don’t want to wait for their content
to buffer.
This issue matters particularly in
some critical areas. Like autonomous
driving. Crucial decisions the car has
to take cannot depend on data from
the car going to a distant data centre
to be analysed.
CUTTING EDGE
MADE IN INDIA
So we need smaller data centres
at the network edge – as close to the
source of data as possible – in order
to reduce latency and bandwidth use.
Schneider Electric’s Bengaluru
R&D centre has played a major role
in conceptualising and creating mi-
cro data centres for the Indian mar-
ket and the world. A key product of
The Bengaluru R&D centre is the
3rd largest after the firm’s US and
Shanghai centres
Mechanical, electrical,
instrumentation and control
engineers and IoT specialists are
heavily sought after for R&D
Employees of Schneider Electric in India
only 80 units, and the rest is lost for
various reasons, the PUE is 1.25
(100/80). A lower PUE means less
energy is getting wasted.
PUE becomes a critical factor
when you consider the need for tens
of thousands or even hundreds of
thousands of edge micro data centres
in tier-II and tier-III cities across In-
dia. “The problem of sustainability
is bigger for smaller data centres,
since the bigger data centres can be
upgraded over time, but upgrading
such a large number of smaller data
Kranthi Kumar | STAFF ENGINEER
Doctorate in nanoscience from
IISc Bangalore. Joined WD India
in 2017. Kranthi was awarded a
trade secret for a new method
for improving endurance of flash
memory cells by tracking the
program state. The
endurance (number
of program/erase
cycles that can
be applied) is
increasingly a
concern on account
of storing more bits
per cell
Himani Jawa | SENIOR ENGINEER
MTech from IIIT Delhi. Joined in
2017. Himani’s work revolves
around the verification
domain. She is particularly
interested in applying ML and
AI in the verification domain.
She has filed five trade secrets,
mainly in improving
verification methodologies
biases arising due to decisions
Kanika Jain | PRODUCT ENGINEER taken with the help of AI and
Joined WD India in 2017 after completing BTech in talks about how fairness can be
computer science from PEC University of Technology, implemented while using these
algorithms,” says Ganguly.
Chandigarh. Kanika filed a trade secret – along with
The professor is also con-
four colleagues in India and US – for an idea to shorten
cerned that CS’s focus on AI is
the turnaround time for achieving matured yield goals.
drawing the field away from its
Yield is the percentage of chips in a finished wafer that original objective – building bet-
pass all tests and functions properly ter operating systems, computer
networks and new device driv-
Vishnupriya V | SENIOR ENGINEER
ers. “With attention shifting to
MTech from NIT Tiruchirappalli. Joined in 2018. building AI algorithms, the fo-
Vishnupriya joined the verification team and within cus on system research and edu-
six months of her joining, she filed for a trade secret cation is going down, which may
with the support of her team. She then further impact the future. Somewhere
enhanced her verification and automation skills in the this is already leading to a
dearth of good systems engi-
analog domain and contributed to two more trade
neers in the industry,” he adds.
secrets in this field He thinks AI should ideally
Jatin Gaur | SENIOR ENGINEER have been driven by the statis-
Completed BTech from PEC University
tics or mathematics depart-
ment, since statistics and math-
of Technology, Chandigarh. During his ematics are at the heart of AI.
internship with WD in 2016, Jatin worked But instead, AI got associated
on a smart data organiser which would with CS. He thinks that is be-
automatically sort all the content present on cause CS tends to be driven by
any storage device along with the capability what the market wants. Time
to search ‘smartly’ on the device using AI. will tell how this will impact
progress in computing systems.
This idea became a full project later,
Ganguly, who has been
for which he filed a patent
who know everything about
computers, and some
who have had
no exposure
at all
Prof Niloy
Ganguly |
DEPARTMENT
OF CS, IIT-
KHARAGPUR
teaching in the country’s first
IIT since 2005 and is an alumnus
of the renowned institute, says
doing a PhD could be very help-
ful, especially in an industry
known for changing its focus
every five to ten years. “PhD
teaches us how to define a prob-
lem, devise a methodology to
solve it, and establish its impor-
tance to the world. This entire
process helps one understand
how ideas are implemented end-
to-end and can be immensely
useful for people to survive in
the industry,” he says.

My love affair with India just got better

the company, the Ecostruxure Micro
Data Centre FX-I, was completely
conceived and designed by the centre
here specifically for Indian voltage
and environmental conditions.
Sharma says research shows that
75% of the data generated will be at
centres is impossible,” Sharma says.
One method the company used to
cut PUE was to adopt a ‘free cooling’
method to contain the heat generated
in data centres. Free cooling discards
the traditional method of using com- Swati.Bharadwaj@timesgroup.com quickly build powerful apps with Management, which enables the
pressors and simply sucks in cooler THE GURU seamless connectivity across peo- sharing of information in knowl-

the network edge. “Which is why a
smaller data centre closer to the cus-
tomer is crucial,” he says.
Data centres also currently con-
sume a lot of power. And the pace at
which data centre use is growing,
their need for energy is expanding
exponentially. Renewable energy
can’t keep up with the growth.
So a major effort at the R&D cen-
tre has been to improve the power
efficiency of the data centres. “We
have created solutions to bring down
the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
of data centres drastically,” says
Sharma. PUE is a metric used to de-
termine energy efficiency. For exam-
ple, if a 100 units of power is coming
into the data centre, and it utilises
air from the outside after discarding
the heat into the environment.
An internal study found that if
Schneider were to build 100,000 micro
data centres with a low PUE at de-
sign, it would be similar to removing
the pollution caused by 50,000 cars
on the streets.
Products engineered and re-
searched in the West don’t always
work in India, says Sharma. “We took
inputs from our western engineers
and put together what would work
for the Indian voltage and environ-
mental conditions. If something
works in India it can work anywhere.
So, we are now replicating the Indian
micro data centre solution in other
parts of the world.”
B
ill McDermott is running a
packed schedule. The former
CEO of SAP is less than three
months into his new job as CEO of
ServiceNow, and he is shopping for
new AI capabilities – he’s already
acquired Passage AI and Loom
Systems – and has embarked on a
`Dream Big Tour’ to meet every
employee of the company.
He has covered 11 locations and
came away most impressed by the
talent at its Hyderabad R&D cen-
tre. The centre has been at the
forefront of some of the key devel-
opments at the digital workflow
transformation company that now
has a market cap of $63 billion.
“My long-standing love affair
with India just got even better. In-
dia is such a great location for
ServiceNow. This is among our
biggest development centres…we
have a great workforce here and
our business here is growing in
triple digits. India is the jewel in
our crown,” he says.
McDermott says he’s been very
impressed with the level of educa-
tion of engineers, the software EQ,
the commitment, and passion of
the workforce. “We can innovate
in India and take many of our pro-
totypes and designs globally…I
walk out of here saying we have to
double down on India. When you
think about the great places in the
global economy to build software
dreams, I can think of no better
place than India,” he says.
Nearly 15% of ServiceNow’s
global headcount of over 10,300 is
based in India, a good part of that
in Hyderabad. India accounted for
about 20% of all hires in 2019.
McDermott says the mobile
version of the Now platform –
which enables enterprises to
ple and processes – has been inno-
vated in India. “I just met with the
leader here on the development
side. We’re putting AI throughout
the whole Now platform. Think of
it as an automated workflow that
has AI going through it. So the hu-
man gets to do the high value work
and the computer gets to predict
where the faultlines are. The pre-
dict offers a better alternative be-
fore the mistakes are made or
rectifies a problem before it even
becomes a problem. There is no
other company that has this plat-
form,” he says.
The Service Catalog, which
provides customers with self-ser-
vice opportunities, and Knowledge
edge bases, were engineered here.
Both products are used by almost
all of ServiceNow’s customers.
The centre also created prod-
ucts like Virtual Agent solutions
and Dynamic Translation (using
partner capabilities like language
translation) to enhance communi-
cation between requestors and
agents with different language
preferences.
The concept for the Dynamic
Translation tool, which helps di-
verse teams of employees commu-
nicate across language differences
while working on the same task,
sprung from a Hyderabad devel-
oper’s efforts during a team hack-
athon, says McDermott.