Panelists
Bryan Dove Chief Technology Officer, Skyscanner
Maria Gutierrez VP Engineering, FreeAgent
Jonathan Snook Author of Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS
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Engineering Turing Fest 2017
Panel Discussion: Bryan Dove, Maria Gutierrez & Jonathan Snook
Bryan Dove , Maria Gutierrez , Jonathan Snook
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
I would like to start carrying on from your excellent talk, Vaughn, because that raised so many, so many questions. I had on my list of things I wanted to bring up, security, encryption, privacy, all of those kind of things, and that just neatly follows on from what you're saying.
You showed us what was possible and you raised the question of it's not what can we do it's what should we do. How as an industry are we going to stop the bad people doing the bad things and be good people doing good things?
Yeah. So so putting that talk together, it's just a set of topics that I tend to think about quite a lot. And I think as I dove into looking at some of the things that are possible, the pessimism actually increased. You start to see all of these things that people could do.
And you start off a little bit pessimistic. I think what's what's really made me very optimistic on where this is going is that there are enough people looking at these problems, talking about them, working on them in ways that really protect users. And so you see lots and lots of various startups and at scale companies using deep learning and various other AI techniques to improve information security, to better detect intrusions, to be able to detect malicious actors, to protect against botnet attacks and DDoS and things like this.
You also see more and more research going into the prevention or the detection of manipulated video. So for example, the video that I showed that had Barack Obama doing the talk that he never actually gave. The researcher, their very next project is to figure out now that they're able to synthesize that, how do they build algorithms that can detect when videos have been manipulated in that same way or in similar related ways.
So I think a lot of the research is both discovering these techniques and figuring out how to detect them and prevent against them that people are ultimately trying to do the right thing. Well, thing I was going to add to that is that if, I mean there are those types of things but there's a lot more subtlety of manipulation that I think we condone.
And if you look at Facebook and any number of organizations where their metrics are engagement And they essentially run a number of experiments on how to improve engagement. And once you start to look at, you know, how these companies can sell to you better, you know, how do you fight against that?
Is that something that should be fought against? I think that's an interesting point because one of the, when I've had a discussion on this matter with people before, one of the things I find strange is that somebody like me, I care about privacy, whereas my niece and my nephew who are generation below me, they just don't care.
They have no expectation of privacy anymore. Whereas I still think we should have that. And so, where's the actual line? As you're saying with Facebook, if you're not paying them, then you are the product. How do you get the service coming from the service without actually being the product yourself?
So you had an interesting model at Skyscanner. It's a free service, and yet you managed to make money from it. Were there any issues about ethics that needed to come from that? Yeah. So I think from the beginning where Skyscanner's been founded, it's actually had quite a very strong code of ethics.
So a very simple one in travel is, do you let your suppliers pay you money to change where they show up in search results? This is what Google does, this is what Facebook does, this is what a number of engines do. And we've been very consistent and strict from the beginning that we always aim for the traveler and always sort by the lowest price regardless of what the economics are for us in the back end.
So it might be that the cheapest thing also pays us the least amount, but we want to make sure that we're serving travelers first. And that has been something that is woven into the ethos of the company. And I think it's one of those things that actually only happens at the start of a company.
You know, you'll get Google saying, you know, do no evil and and start with that as a as a mission and really engage and weave that into everything that they do. Could argue whether that's really carried on for the next twenty years or not, but that's a different question.
Well, there's an interesting point there with the experiment that's being done in London about with our NHS records being handed over them to search through. Basically it wasn't supposed to be a good idea, but I have to say as a patient, I wouldn't be happy with that happening without my concern.
I don't know in your industry, Mary, I know it's a great service, use it, I pay for it, so I have an expectation of privacy there. Is Is there anything that you have to worry about in the ethics of what you do apart from not selling my data to somebody else?
One of the things that is most important to us is how we kind of keep that data. We have financial information and personal information about individuals or businesses, so we need to put security first and we need to be very sure that that data is handled in the proper way and that people don't have access to information that can be quite sensitive.
So any personal identifiable information needs to be treated very carefully. So as part of our development process, we need to make sure that all engineers are equipped to know exactly how they need to handle that information, what things need to be encrypted, how long do we need to retain that information.
And there's a lot of legislation coming up as well that is going to put a lot more emphasis in that. GDPR is coming into place in May next year, and there will be huge fines for businesses if we don't take those things seriously and handle that information properly.
So, yeah, it's a big part of the job. Because you work in more than one jurisdiction, don't you? Because you're in the UK and overseas. Is it just Europe or is it the US as well? It's we have a universal product, so it can be used worldwide, but about I think more than ninety percent of our customers are UK Okay.
And Skyscan obviously is worldwide. Now, there issues there about what the different expectation of the rules are and what people need in the different jurisdictions? Yeah. Think Maria mentioned a couple that will affect UK and Europe. And all around the world you have various regulations and various things that you need to do.
But I do think you also hit on a really key part which is when you're talking about the NHS that you don't want them to do it without your consent. And one of the really fundamental pieces is that a lot of the information that gets captured and stored and used is often done without individual's consent.
You look at the digital advertising industry or anything like this. I think that's really where you see products starting to stand apart. Where they do these things with an opt in and with a consent so that if you thought that the NHS and DeepMind collaboration could help you, you could say please use my information, I would really like the assistance.
It's very different than them doing it without with perhaps out your permission. And But but what what do all think? Because because the thing that came to mind when you said that is the cookie law. I mean, that was brought in to to to make sure you had to opt in to having cookies on your own.
But then, everybody just think this is nonsense. We're all just going, yeah, opt in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you draw the line there of the user experience being good, but also having opt ins for the data being Personally, I think that's where the balance comes in and it's hard.
I think it becomes easy to pick on the cookie piece in terms of the way that it's manifested. But again, the intent was right, which is how do I know what I'm doing and know what trade off that I'm making? I don't know that there's any silver bullet solution.
It becomes specific to your particular product, particular industry, even down to the particular type of user or or the different constituency that you're appealing to. It's only gonna get harder with GDPR because you're gonna have to have always implicit concern explicit concern concern instead of implicit.
So I think that's a part that is gonna be quite tricky when it comes to user experience because I'm one of those people that is completely annoyed every time, especially on a phone. It's so intrusive. So, yeah, that's gonna be hard work. Jonathan, do you I mean, you you work in the field of CSS and and style and what what things look like.
Does this impact on any of the choices that you need to make as a designer? Yeah, absolutely. I mean from a design perspective a lot of this ultimately affects the user experience and I think as we've seen with the cookie notifications and whatnot, people become blind to them without even paying attention.
Same thing with, you know, desktops and getting these notifications of like, you know, we run into an error and you just get into this habit of clicking okay even when it affects your privacy and all these other issues. And that is a difficult problem to solve because people are ultimately they're inconvenienced by this and even though it's important they're not thinking about how it's affecting them in some possible way down the road.
They're just like, I just want get this thing done. Move it out of the way so I can get back to what I want to do. Yeah, that's a good point. So do you think, I use the terms like encryption security privacy as one monolithic combination.
I just always think of them being together. Do you think that there is that's the right way to think about it? Do you think we should be splitting out things like the encryption discussion from whether privacy is important or is it just the same thing?
Think for me, I think they're all closely related because these are the techniques that we use to do the right things for our users. And what is the right thing depends on your industry, depends on your economic model, depends on what exact service that you're providing.
But ultimately we have these tools and others to help us do the right thing. And I think what becomes more important is being really intentional and deliberate about what is the right thing for your users given your situation. And then you may employ security and various privacy things, but you may not need to employ encryption or vice versa.
You might do quite a lot of encryption, but privacy may not be an issue. So it just depends on exactly what your scenario is. And I think it's more about being thoughtful and deliberate rather than accidental. And one final thought about this. Do you think there's any difference between the desktop user experience and the mobile user experience in this case?
Because I know that the stats from Google show that for many people in many parts of the world now, they don't use desktop at all. It's only mobile. And that's something that we should all be thinking about in design choices, that mobile first is going to be a key thing.
Now, given that with the mobile, you've got the phone number and a location as part of that experience, whether you like it or not, do you think there's any issues there that we need to think about explicitly making a design choice that says, well, mobile has these extra problems that we need to address, that we have to somehow convey an expectation of privacy despite the fact we know all this really important stuff about you?
I think that, you know, it's whether or not that expectation is there, I think it would be great to be at a point where that privacy was just there, that we didn't have to make assumptions or run through hoops to understand whether or not it is or isn't there.
So if we look at encryption and just you know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS and some of the signals that browsers and devices give us to say whether or not we're running over a secure connection. You know, with mobile, once we move to watches, once we move to voice, how do you display that kind of information?
There's going to have to be that the privacy is there by default. That if it's this layer that is added on that is a choice, then it's it becomes a barrier to getting that that privacy and security that you need. As a business as well, I we need to be very conscious of why are we capturing any data.
We could take so much information from any interaction that our customers do with the systems, but we should really be questioning, do we need that information? What is the goal? And if we don't really know, if it's just, oh, it might come in handy in the future, you shouldn't be capturing because you are creating a big problem for yourself on how you have to manage or if you have a bridge and most businesses at one point or another will have some sort of bridge, you don't want to be in a position that you are just
collecting data that you don't have a use for that can then cause you a lot of problem and lose your credibility with your users down the line. That's a good point about reputation capitals is one of the key currencies of a successful business, isn't it?
So I want to move on to one of the things we were talking about in preparation for doing this forum. We were talking about what's the important things in running a successful software business. Somebody, I think it was Anna Shipman said, well, first, there's two problems.
One is getting good people. People's the most important thing in the business. And the second thing is getting people to understand that people are the most important thing in the business. Now you were touching on your talk, Marie, about the need to get good people and that having distributed working can help with that.
What else could you do to attract and retain the excellent people that you need in a business? I think, first of all, you have to have something that motivates them to come every day to work. And sometimes for some people, kind of the division of the business will be the most important.
It might not be for everybody at the beginning of my career. It wasn't really the thing that drove me. I just wanted to learn about what I was doing, so I was more worried about having the opportunity to work with a group of people that are very capable and that can help me grow in my career.
And as I became more senior, then I got more fussy about the things that that I wanted to do and the impact that that is gonna have in the world or, you know, something that I can really get behind and that I believe when I'm doing it.
But ultimately, to me, it's extremely important to create the right environment for people to do the best job that they can do and that you really understand what that is for each individual because it might be different. And put a lot of emphasis when I talk about those things on diversity because I think it's really important and more increasingly so as kind of technology evolves that we are building things for all sorts of people.
So we should be able to get that input from all those people that potentially can be our customers. Technical skill is very important, but there's different levels of technical skill that you need. For example, you might need people that have very strong computer science background in your team because you are doing a type of work that you absolutely need that skill.
But everything that we do in a team, you know, in technology today doesn't require that kind of skills. And I find sometimes more important to have people that have maybe the human collaboration skills or the domain specific skills. Like, I would love to have accountants that have cross trained to technical kind of skills to help us build free agents.
So I think as a leader, you need to be very conscious and careful of what kind of teams you want to build and what kind of skills you want to put there because ultimately will benefit the product that you create. I see you nodding there. I have a question.
Please come back on that if you'd like to, but also I have a question, is with Skyscanner, you've gone from being a tiny company to being this amazingly high growth company to now being a company that's been sold. How do you manage the expectation, keeping employees happy in all of those scenarios, or can you?
Well, think there are multiple epochs in a company's journey. And so you picked out a couple. But really if you talk to anybody who's been on that journey, they will tell you about five, six, seven, eight, ten different inflection points along the way.
Right, there's the path from being a startup till the first time that somebody tells you, hey, you should go check out the Skyscanner thing. You're like, alright, awesome. And then you take it forward to the point where a company's profitable. You take it to the point where company's growing, you have to get another office.
There are all these milestones along the way and at all various different points, it will become a size organization, a size problem that will attract some people and no longer be interesting to some people. I think what's important when we look at the team on the journey is that similar to what Maria said is that they've got to really connect with the vision.
I think people have to really believe that they're being challenged every day and that they're coming to work to learn something. We work in a highly creative field. And being in this area where you just feel like you're doing the same routine things every day and you're going to get bored and you're to go somewhere else to I think one of the advantages of having scale as well as these organizations get larger is that you can address it where somebody is no longer challenged in the part of their
business they're working on today, but they could go somewhere else. And I do think something that I feel get right at Skyscanner but not all companies get this right is you have somebody in a job on a team and maybe they're critical for that team.
And they're getting bored. And you can either make it really hard for them to move somewhere else because you go, my god, that team's gonna fall apart if that person leaves. But the truth is they're gonna go out the door, get a job across the street and go change projects anyway.
And so it's really incumbent on the leadership to make sure rotation to another part of the organization is truly frictionless. And you always have to keep people engaged in the mission of the organization and feel as they're being challenged, feel like they're learning, feel like they're developing and improving as they go along.
I think along all of these different steps along the journey, that's really been the most important part for individuals that they constantly feel that by being at an organization at Skyscanner, they're improving what they can offer. They're working on increasingly complex problems, and they're bettering their own skills along the way.
And Jonathan, you're the other end of the spectrum. You're freelance. So you're in a very small organization of one, as am I. How do you keep yourself motivated with doing the interesting stuff and keeping yourself going to do the things you want to do in that?
I think in some ways I have the advantage of the fact that I can pick and choose my projects. And so if I feel like I want to focus on something else, that I can pick projects and clients that are geared towards that particular thing and if I feel like you know I'm kind of tired and done that, I want to move on to something else, that I have that freedom to move around.
And organizations, I think good ones help enable that. Like I've worked in organizations that allowed you to move from department to department and really flex those skills and other organizations are very much like no, this is where you are. If you don't like it you have to leave the company and that's a horrible place to be.
So having, I like fresh exciting things to be able to learn new stuff. But I know that everybody has different things. A lot of people within organizations you know, they like the safety of just having a regular paycheck. So you know, how do you kind of deal with those?
I've been in large organizations. When I was at Yahoo the company had already been around for fifteen years and there were people that had been there for a decade and that kind of mentality of the lifers and that weren't trying to work their way up the chain.
It's kind of interesting to kind of balance those against the people that are like, I'm moving my way up. I'm trying to like move on to the next challenge and the next challenge and trying to pit those with people that maybe don't have quite the same passion but are still technically very capable.
They have the skills. They can work well with people. They're just maybe not as ambitious. At the same time, they are valuable people to the team. And at the other end of the spectrum, I'd like to talk a bit about how we train up the new generation, whether they're old people coming into the industry for the first time or people coming from school or university.
Could you just you two talk about how you actually do that yourself in the policies within within your companies? First one, Maria. In a free agent, for example, we hire people that either come from university with a computer science degree or other similar degrees.
We've also hired people from coding boot camps, for example, like CodeClan here in Scotland. So we have a very kind of different skill set of people that come in and their first job in technology and you need to be able to support them.
And it's been very interesting and and I've really enjoyed like, I personally I myself come from a completely different background. My background is not computer science. So my first degree was in journalism, and I decided to retrain and did a conversion course back in the year two thousand, I can have a lot of empathy with those people that come with a different background and that they can learn kind of those things on the job.
So what we try to do is the basics is creating a very inclusive culture where those people are allowed to not know things and to fail and to ask any question no matter how silly might come across and that people won't see them as silly, they would see them as an opportunity for those people to to grow.
And that's probably the most important thing that you can do as a leader to really bring those people up and their, you know, their skill level, is to really create that expectation with your more experienced, team members. That is the responsibility and their success will be measured if those people are also successful.
So always have people available to work with them and create the environment where they can learn those things and ask any questions that they need. And we've had amazing success with that. Like, some of the people that we've hired in the last couple of years since kind of I've been at FreeAgent and before I was there, they are incredible contributors to the team and the company and they are delivering amazing work.
It's well worth putting the investment because they will be very thankful for the opportunity, but they are going to bring all these different ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise. Vaum, your growth has been so great. You must be constantly looking. And I know at Tech Meetup, the people from Sky's been always saying, yes, we're hiring.
We're hiring. We're always hiring. How do you manage to get the numbers that you need, but also maintain the quality that you need? To be fair, it's a lot of work. Doing interviewing well in a way that you have a great experience for the candidate regardless of the outcome, that your team feels engaged, you feel like you're getting people that are not just capable in their individual technical skills, but will actually be successful in the environment of the company.
And every company is different. There's no guarantee that the people who will be successful at Skyscan will be successful at FreeAgent or vice versa. It is a very personal thing to each culture. What you really want to be looking for is you want to find people that will reinforce those same sets of behaviors that make people successful in your environment and that you continue to strengthen that.
Over the last couple of years, we've actually rebuilt quite a lot of the interviewing process. And a big part of this was to take it down to basics. What is it really that we're looking for? What is it really that makes people successful in our environment?
What is the level of technical expertise that people may need? What is the right way to evaluate technical expertise? And how do you do that in a way that doesn't unconsciously bias for one thing or another, right? There's oodles of literature on how you can do this and how you can improve technology interviews.
And so it's actually been quite a long running process and it really is a re engineering process the same way that you build any new piece of software that you need to go rebuild something. You take a look at the old thing, you take it apart, you look at what worked well, what didn't work well.
And you look externally and internally for all types of ideas. You run experiments until you get to something that works. I think we feel good about where we are now. And there, by no means is it perfect. We've got a long list of things that we try to make better just every week, every couple weeks.
But we do run it just the same way we build software, which is we have retrospectives, we look at what we've done well, what feedback do we get from candidates, what are areas we can improve on. And we're constantly trying to refine it.
And you have to look at it and value it and invest the time as though it's just another big system that you have to operate the company. Because otherwise, it decays, it loses quality, and either your bar drops, the quality of candidates that you're finding drops, you're not able to grow the team and do other products that you want to.
And do you find that it's better to, when you're looking for recent graduates, for example, to go for somebody who has a wider range of experience and knows quite a lot about many things? Or for somebody who's an absolute expert in a specific thing, is it wide or deep is what we look It's a really good question.
Our interview, we actually tell candidates what our interview is. We don't think there's a lot of secrets to it. The things that we really look for are in two dimensions. One, can somebody solve hard problems? And we look at this almost in the abstract, unless so can you write the code to rebuild Twitter in forty five minutes on a whiteboard, which I don't know how anybody would do that.
But we look at, if you get faced with a problem you've never faced before, do you know how to ask questions? Can you refine requirements? Can you make trade offs? What happens when you hit a dead end? What happens when you need to get a hint?
What happens when you receive new information or your problem changes? These are the things we actually do all day, right? We're actively solving problems, so we work that through in a scenario. The other behavior that we really care about is being willing to go deep, which is not the same as being a deep world class expert on a technology.
But we usually talk to people, and it doesn't matter if they're a university graduate or twenty years of experience. It's usually, what's the coolest thing you've ever built? And you should be able to have a forty five minute conversation about that. And how did that work? What trade offs did you make?
What would you have done differently if you did it again? What did you learn? What's the biggest thing you've learned that you'll apply on the next time? What was the thing that was that bug that just drove you nuts for three weeks to get it to work?
And you really can understand how somebody thinks about solving problems, how they care about the details, what are the things that really matter to them. And you can understand if they have that innate skill. So we do look at technical and coding abilities as well, absolutely.
But we don't fixate on a particular language because the language that's important today is gonna be very different than the language that's important in eighteen or twenty four months. And we focus much more on the behaviors and the willing to get your hands dirty and the willing to solve problems because those are really the skills that transcend over time.
There's two things that sometimes when you're trying to hire for a position, I am very conscious that you need to pay attention to. And sometimes you're going to have to hire for expertise because you absolutely need somebody that is an expert on that specific area.
Introduce, I don't know, Kafka to your stack and, you know, you start, you have a few engineers that are trying it for the first time and you decide that you want to put it in production and you might want to start looking. If you're going to support it at scale, say, hey, well, let's start looking for somebody that has been there, done that and can save us a lot of problems.
But sometimes what you really want to hire is for potential. And I think that's a very important thing when it comes to diversity because we all know, for example, with gender diversity, there's not a ton of women in the industry, so they probably haven't had similar experiences that they can say, I've been there, done that.
There's other roles, like if you look for people in a board, for example, and you're trying to find a diverse board, I mean, how many people have been a CFO of a big company? Very little. So the chances that you will get a diverse candidate are next to none.
And it's the same for us in technology, and I think that's why it's very important sometimes that you really look into the potential of what that person can do with the right support and the right kind of environment, is as important So you brought up the question of women in the industry and this is something I would like to discuss because I've been in the industry since the mid-80s and I think we have as few women in the industry now or less than we did when I
graduated and I've the dark and the white hair. It's been a while. Why do you think it is that we struggle as an industry to to attract women into it and keep them in it? Because there are a lot of ********. Is it just that?
I mean, because I I don't think I've ever met any particular discrimination against me because I'm female. I have met some people who could behave better, both male and female. Is it but is it just that? I think there's a whole lot of reasons that potentially we are here, whether, you know, the biases potentially they will have from earlier on in in children's life that maybe teachers are telling them that they shouldn't be doing of STEM subjects versus more humanistics or whatnot.
It can be the environment. Not always easy to be the only person in a room like you with twenty other people, and there's people that might be okay with that. I know a lot of people that are not, okay with that. It's behaviors, it's biases when it comes to give them opportunities.
I I think there's a million different reasons what what that might be. I started here in Edinburgh the Women Who Code Network, and one of the reasons that I did that is because I am very conscious that most of the opportunities that I've had through my career have been because of the connections and networks and people that I've met over the years that have then pointed me or kind of told me to go and join them in with them with them.
And if women are not having those opportunities, they are missing in a lot of of those opportunities. And in Edinburgh here, we have a great tech scene, but if you go to the majority of the meetups, there's hardly ever any women in those groups.
I I can vouch for you because at the tech meetup, which I used to help help run, we sometimes get halfway around the room to me before there'd be a woman who'd actually say, hey, I'm here, this is why I'm here. And there's there's there's many reasons, you know, some people might argue, well, why don't they go?
They're And yes, of course, they're welcome, but not everybody will feel welcome or comfortable going into that position. So I I was quite convinced that if we put a group where specifically kind of women were invited to come and network, that it would be successful.
And it was a gamble because I thought, well, maybe not, maybe they're not interested in coming in. And we've been running this since February and we have almost four hundred people sign up. And these are people that haven't been attending and taking advantage of any of the other groups and opportunities that we have in Edinburgh.
So I think there is, you know, when I talk to them, I mean, were in one of those meetups, they absolutely adore it and they keep on coming every every month and and it's higher numbers, and we get kind of that feedback of the value of building those relationships.
Some people are already finding jobs because they got in touch with somebody or they are learning about something new because they're talking with somebody. So I think we we need to do whatever we can to create those opportunities. And as leaders in our organization, we need to make sure that we are not putting any barriers in place for those people to feel included.
But as a community as well, we need to find a way that we can really remove all those biases and create those opportunities because we will all eventually, you know, obviously benefit from that. We have time I think for one more question which I'm going to fire at you all.
In fact, I'll give you two options. Can answer either of these questions. Fast forward ten years, what does the internet look like? That's one question. The other one, the alternative is, if you were starting out now, which technology should you be learning right now to get a job?
Jonathan, let me start with you. Oh, great. Thanks. So to answer the second one in a very non committal way, I mean it's really hard to commit to any technology for longer than I feel like six months to a year. There's always something new, something different.
I can't even imagine necessarily what we'll be developing in and what we'll be playing with ten years from a technology perspective. I think the things that do interest me are things around AI and machine learning, especially outside of the big companies like Google and Microsoft.
Like right now, think a lot of that technology has been moving to bigger companies, I would love to see a lot of that power in the individual developer and independent developer. Yeah. Think that would be, for me, where I would like people to focus on.
Good. I'm the same. I I don't think I would focus on a specific language at all because we know that that's going to change. You need to know the principles, how to code. I one of the things that I always would like to find time to to spend more doing is understanding more kind of data science and more than anything, because those are generic concepts that you can apply to any kind of information and you can really get business value out of understanding and being able to
get those insights. But I have a computer science degree, for example, and that's a question that a lot of people ask me, it's like, if you started, would you go back and get a computer science degree? I don't feel I've needed. I think as long as you have opportunity to learn on the go what you need to know, but I would love to have it as much as I would like to.
I would just like to do a quick poll here. Which of you has a computer science degree? Do you? Do you? And I don't either. I'm engineering. I would love to know all those things, but I would also know like to have an MBA.
I would like to have an accounting background. I would like to have psychology background. Trust me as a manager would come quite handy. So it's about finding the right things that you need to know for the specific job that you're doing. I don't think there's a silver bullet for anything.
And Van? So I think ten years is a really long time when it comes to technology. So it's less about the language, but I do think there are a couple patterns that are really indicative. One, the world will only continue to move towards apps.
Right? It will be some form of native mobile development. And whether it's Google streaming technology or whatever Apple emulates with that or something else to make apps smaller or more convenient or whatever. But the idea of getting a richer, more native experience versus more of a kind of least common denominator experience, the better experience will always win.
And so I think there is absolutely a skill there. I think on the back end, apps are more and more pushing all of the information back to the cloud. So public cloud, machine learning, being able to build micro services, being able to build them quickly.
These are all common techniques that likely will not shift over that window of time regardless of what the technologies to implement them are. And then the only thing I would add to that is the only thing I would predict is everything's going to keep changing because it has been doing for the last thirty years.
I see no reason why it would change. And that's why I love it as a job. So with that, what I'm going to do is bring this to a close. Thank you very much my panelists, Jonathan Schnurt, Maria Gutierrez, and Ryan Dove. Thank you.