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The second in our series of spotlight interviews with members of the Torc team, I spoke with Torc CTO and Co-founder David Messinger about his time before Torc, his thoughts on the changes in remote working over the last two decades, the Torc community’s impact and influence on its platform, and more.
Q: So the first question is, can you please tell me a bit about your background pre-Torc?
A: I was originally a computer science major. I later worked primarily as a back-end developer. I found myself in the right place at the right time, working with some of the cutting-edge tech of the era on some of the first e-commerce sites, such as priceline.com and Best Buy. After that, I left and went to Topcoder, which was one of the earliest gig economy remote worker platforms out there. We were at the forefront of using developers from around the world before it was really popular.
After that, I went to a company called Appirio, where we started another crowdsourcing company called Cloudspokes, which was built inside Appirio. Appirio was the first true cloud SI. We did Salesforce, Google, and Workday, and we were ahead of the curve on cloud computing at that point…it was very early on when cloud and Salesforce first started.
So, I’ve been around for some good times, and I’m excited again right now with Torc and seeing AI be the next big wave. Being involved in that is another really important moment in my career and in tech as a whole.
Q: I saw on your bio page on the ‘about Torc’ section of the site that you've been working with remote developers for 25-plus years. What initially attracted you to that?
A: If you think about it, being on the internet was kind of the great equalizer. For example, when I was in high school, and later in college, I was a pretty decent poker player. But that was when I was playing against people in my college, or in my dorm room. Then, once I went online, I played against people that were 100 times better than I was.
Yeah, I’ve had the exact same experience.
I think everyone has. And not just with poker, even something like playing Madden football for example. Same situation.
When we started Topcoder early on, it grew quickly, very organically, and went international. And when you see the talent of some of these people…it’s amazing to see another person you’re working with who lives halfway around the world is 8x better than you. It's a humbling experience. I always like to work with the best people possible. It makes you learn and creates a more fun environment.
Absolutely. I mean, talent can come from anywhere. And having access to that is a great thing for everyone. Plus, some people don't have the opportunity to work for companies like Torc in their home countries, remote working opportunities have changed that.
Yeah, and I think if you think about it, Salesforce was one of the first platforms where it’s irrelevant if you're a billion-dollar company, or you're a three-person mom-and-pop shop. Either way, you get access to the same high-quality software. And SaaS and cloud became a great democratization of giving anyone access to the same resources. So have advancements in global internet speed.
I think a company like Torc, where we give these same opportunities to people regardless of their location or any other demographic metric, in combination with giving them the same power of being able to work online with the best cloud tools available – like AI tools – is pretty amazing. It’s proof you can have, basically, the same working experience that you may have with your best friend who lives down the street, that you go grab a bite with after work, as you can with someone that's on the other side of the world. Such as us right now, since we’re conducting this interview from different continents! That's a great thing.
Q: And how do you feel remote working has changed over the last two decades?
A: I think, going back two decades ago, if you walked into a CTO’s office and pitched the idea of hiring a remote developer, they're thinking, “Wait…You're going to give my code to someone who’s halfway around the world and they’re going to work on their personal computer, and they need to get access to my network and to my computers?”
They’d look at you like you were crazy.
Things have changed, and I think Uber was the first example where people realized, ok, these people have cars, access is easier. The overall quality and experience is better, and people just enjoy it a lot more than the old-fashioned way. That made it a lot more exciting, and a lot more simple when you go into an office to pitch, and you say, hey, we have an Uber version of this or an Uber version of that.
The industry is moving that way with offshoring. People have become more and more open to it. With the cloud, and SaaS, the ability to spin up developer environments becomes easier. And then the pandemic hit and everybody was forced to work from home, forced to work remotely. At that point, people realized, ok, if I'm already working remotely with ‘Debbie Developer’ and ‘John Java,’ why can’t I work with a person based in Argentina. It's the same time zone, and it’s still the same working experience, more or less. So I think the pandemic multiplied the ability to go more permanently remote tenfold.
Q: Can you share how community feedback has influenced Torc’s product development and innovation?
A: It drives the vast majority of what we're trying to do. Our profiles for example. We're trying to build the best profiles out there and get feedback from the community on what people think should go on the profile. Our goal is to make a developer’s Torc profile exportable, so they can even apply for a job that is not supplied by Torc if they want. We are a developer first type company.
We recently started giving developers access to Google certifications, because we were hearing how freelancers don’t have access to educational options. So, we deliver educational options right to our developer community. We just launched a store, which came after we received feedback that people wanted some more Torc swag. For Torc employees, they get free licenses to AI and productivity tools.
The other important piece that we're trying to work on is the interview process. When we first started, we talked to people and the feedback we got was, “OK, I'm interviewing for five or six jobs. Each of these jobs has five or six different interview processes. Each one wants me to do a take-home test.”
That’s a lot! When you think about that, if you put yourself in the developer’s shoes, they have to do four or five interviews, an hour and a half each, plus two two-hour take-home tests, but they’re also applying for five or six jobs. So that's taking almost two weeks of their time, they’re essentially working the hours of a full-time job just to do those applications.
That's something we try to focus on…doing assessments that can be used at multiple interviews. In fact, we have a client for whom we've now staffed, I think, nine people. When they came to us, they gave us an example of the standard interview process they were using, which they had used with other partners. It was a seven-step interview process. It included a two-and-a-half-hour take-home test, plus an hour-and-a-half programming test, plus an hour-long technical interview test, plus a half-hour culture interview.
And when you added it all up, those seven interviews were close to 11 hours worth of work, for both the client and the developer. And what we were able to do was say, “Look at our profiles. Look at our assessments. Look at how we have the GitHub stats.” With all this info, we can say that this developer is a fit. We were able to get them to shrink their process down to get it done in one interview. One culture interview for an hour and a half. That’s it.
So developers in the Torc Community skip a good 10 or so hours of interviews. And that client is having a success rate right now where they're hiring probably one out of every three people they're talking to, which is a better ratio than they had before. But even with that ratio, what now becomes maybe a five-hour commitment, was in the past for them a full work week, it was 35 plus hours.
A starting point for us was always to ask, “What makes the developer experience that much better?” And then, we push that to the clients. We say, “Hey, you want the best developers? Well, developers don't want to put up with this stuff, they want things streamlined. And here's how we're going to structure the platform to make their lives better.”
That was also where I came in. You know the traditional resume matching where it's keywords and that stuff? You tend to miss great talent. We have some AI tools that are more unique in how we match people, but even still we're always keeping the human element in the loop with white glove treatment. The community model where we're meeting and learning the likes and needs of these community members so that we can still scale, but still give more of that white glove treatment to the developers, is proving successful – and a differentiator for Torc from other talent platforms. If the developers are happy, it makes clients happy.
As for the roadmap and platform, anytime anyone wants to have their say, feel free to send a message to dave@torc.dev. I’m always willing to listen to our community for ideas on improvements. We're here to exist for the community. So the more feedback the better.
Q: Speaking of AI, how do you see AI and emerging technologies shaping the future of the industry and the Torc community?
A: I think there are very few points in your career where you’re at the start of really, truly revolutionary things. I am an AI optimist. I think it's just going to get better and better and better. And I don't think AI is going to replace anyone's jobs per se. But rather, people who know how to use AI will replace people in jobs that don't use AI. I’ve been in the industry for over two decades now, and I think every time a new technology comes out, even back when it was a horse and buggy, there are always some old guys sitting there saying, “This will never be better than what we had before.” Or, “This is all there is, and it will never change or improve.” And I think that's something we always need to be cognizant of. When there’s a big new tech, what we need to do is find the best ways to use it and apply it.
ChatGPT for example, I've used it in situations where I've said, “OK, here's a data set. Visualize the trend line on this, or show me all this data on a map.” And it will generate Python code for me. I get an image. I can put that in a Python notebook. And that's almost instantaneous. I can get that stuff done and move on to the next thing rapidly. I've used various tools to know about running bedding on my code and to be able to go back and say, “Hey, where in the code does this feature occur?” And it's been able to say, “Look at this file, look at that file, look at those files.” It would previously take me hours or even days to comb through a code base I wasn't familiar with. Now I can do it right away.
Now, the tricky part with that is always being aware of what is allowed legally to share. So I think that's one thing that we're trying to be very clear about. How do we empower our developers to use the right tool at the right time with the right permissions? And that's something people do have to worry about. But then again, it's also super fun.
Q: How does Torc ensure that its technological advancements are in line with the needs and values of its community?
A: I think that's largely based on dialogue. The way we keep emerging technologies in line with our community is just by speaking with them every day. What we're trying to do is provide talent success, which is having the staff and employees talk to the talent as frequently as possible. We have our Slack and Discord where we interact with the community. We're going to start hosting more community webinars.
I think the other piece of the puzzle is trying to stay in touch with not only our end clients who are hiring developers but also the technology companies. We're talking to Amazon, we're talking to Google, and we have contacts at AI companies as well. We ask them what they're looking for in developers. Where they think the industry is moving so that we can help drive our community to make sure that we’re moving in the same direction.
We also ask ourselves questions. With the platform, “How do we make the best developer experience? What does that look like moving forward?” Some things we've looked at are verified credentials and universal background checks, so that if you get a background check at Torc, but get another job someplace else, you could take that background check with your data and re-use it. The fact that the Torc profile is portable, you can export it, and you can use it elsewhere, is valuable.
Q: What advice would you give to tech leaders looking to build a strong community or innovate in their product space?
A: The key to building a good community is honesty. Being open and transparent, explaining what you're trying to do. If you have some sort of hidden agenda, people will figure it out. I think you see that now, even with some of the bigger open source companies, the idea of this bait and switch or switching of license models and things like that, you really can do yourself a lot of damage. If the community trusts in you, and you give that trust back to them, I think that's pretty helpful when it goes in both directions. You can give the developers more access, and more ability to do things in their own way with less oversight.
I also think rewards are important. Now, the reward doesn't necessarily have to be just monetary. It could be recognition, to be rewarded and recognized for what they're doing. And, you know, you can't, as a community or as a product or something like that, try to take all the glory onto yourself. How do you share in that? And that's how I think you get the community to share things because it's mutually beneficial. So I think that a big part of it is making sure when you look at things you’re mindful of that win-win situation, and ensuring that it's not only a win for you, but it's a win for the community. That's extremely important.
Q: What has been your biggest hurdle so far?
A: I think the hard part is just starting from zero. Getting the name there, building trust and building relationships. I think the other hard part is making sure that your eyes aren’t too big for your stomach, so to speak. We’ve got 10,000 things we want to do. And we're a pretty small and nimble team, so we need to keep focusing on execution, and ensuring that we're doing the right things to move the ball forward. And I think, the space of recruiting, hiring, and consultancy, is ripe for some change. It's been kind of the same way for a long time. If we do it right, we can be very impactful. So just making sure that we don't try to tackle too many things at once and keep making those innovations is always a challenge.
Q: Can you tell me about some of the future plans that you have for the company?
A: I think if you looked at Torc, when we launched two years ago, really what we tried to do is be the first developer-focused talent marketplace. Myself, Mike Morris, and some others on the team have been in talent marketplaces and done some other interesting models in the past.
I think in the long term for Torc, we want to build a platform where we focus on how developers get compensated. Not just for their hourly work, but for the value that they bring to an organization. If you worked on a project, and you developed a piece of code, the monetary value might be, say, $5,000. But instead of you working 50 hours and getting paid $100 an hour, if you did that in 20 hours or 25 hours, you would have got paid twice as much. The value and the price point stay the same because the client agrees that the value is worth that much, and the developer says they can deliver that value. So why do the hours that you work for it matter? I think that's a good way to bring more equity and more value to the community.
The other piece of this I would love is for clients to say, “OK, I'm coming to Torc because I want an on-demand AI developer.” So the client can come and almost instantaneously, identify and hire a developer that knows what they're doing, super-powered by AI, and can start contributing to your business right away.
At the moment, we're doing a match and staffing people within less than a week on average. I would like to get to a spot where it's almost instantaneous. Maybe there are occasions where developers could have an online status and a client says to us, “I want a developer for something right now.” Then they could talk right away and the developer starts immediately. Part of that is that we tell the client that if they want to have this spot filled and talk to the developer, they need to make a decision ASAP, it can't be like you chat for an hour, you go back and schedule three more interviews. We want to remove the friction and get that connection as quickly as possible. And get rid of all that wasted time and effort.
I’ve been working closely with David since my time at Torc began. I’ve found him to be a highly invested and willing collaborator, a terrific source of wisdom and inspiration, and a caring employer who values the work his people put in. As an interview subject, he’s an enthusiastic talker and has a deep passion for the tech field and the amazing developers driving our industry.
