R & D software engineer and Scrum Master, Laurent Pichon today runs the «Engines & Components» development team, designing and building these fundamental blocks underpinning all the solutions and applications in the Geoconcept range. Here he tells us about his journey, his career, what motivates him and how he sees the future.
I started as a straightforward software engineer, and was very quickly appointed manager of everything that concerned the user interface of the Geoconcept application. This is a domain that really interested me, and one I could master. My first mission was therefore to turn the very special dynamic that was there into a concrete reality - something that worked in practical terms, and simplify and refresh the Geoconcept user interface to bring it closer in line with the standards of the most «modern» and «user friendly» applications of that era. This theme is still central to everything we do now.
Once that mission had been accomplished, I expressed a desire to work on more conceptual things, and was appointed architect of
The 3 rd major mission that was entrusted to me at GEOCONCEPT was to manage a development team for things that are still rather «invisible» in a way: this was the «Engines & Components» team. The role of our team is to supply the building blocks that will then be used across the product range. These are components that enable route calculation, map display, and the route optimization engine…
It’s true that my job today involves leading and coordinating a team of about a dozen people, each with a particular expertise. But, happily, I still manage to do quite a bit of development work… This is my passion and I have never wanted to stop doing it. In the technical sector, management functions are not the only way up the ladder. You can choose to rise in terms of expertise, and get really good jobs that are gratifying and recognized, while remaining in the technical camp, as it were. Obviously, there is a human side to this, and it is extremely important: whether we are talking about architecture, the engine or components you never work alone, but are constantly interacting with the other teams in the company.
The move over to SaaS or 100% web architectures was definitely a challenge. When I started, our software was geared to run on heavy-duty workstations. When web solutions appeared on the scene, this led us to slice up these monolithic pieces of software into a series of self-contained «boxes» (the famous engine and components), and to separate these from the graphics side and the user interface so they could be used just as well by a standard piece of software as by our web and cloud applications.
At a purely technical level, the algorithms are not the same as they were 10 or 20 years ago, because research has moved on so much! Now we do things a lot faster. Programming languages are also constantly evolving, some disappear just as quickly as they come into view… fashion also has an impact, and this is why strategic watch is such an integral part of the job of an R&D engineer. It’s essential to keep up to date constantly with anything that can be done better, both at the language level, and also technologies and algorithms, so we can always make the most pertinent choices and offer our customers the most powerful solution possible.
Yes, we create most of our algorithms, but the business of GEOCONCEPT is not to conduct pure research. We have partnerships with research labs that are the real creators of new algorithms. We have to stay at the forefront of what this research world comes up with, spot the algorithms that are interesting for us, understand them, and then use them internally, and sometimes adapt them to our specific needs.
It is, above all, the trust placed in me. I have great freedom of movement, and to act on things, even if, of course, I don’t always do exactly what I want: I have to meet needs as they are presented to me but I have the freedom to find the best way of responding to these needs. Each person in my team has this freedom. That’s what I love about this job: the challenge of finding the best solution and the satisfaction of solving a problem. It’s gratifying. And when one also has a certain liberty so you can do the things you like doing, it’s even more agreeable. This is not the case in every company.
You might think that working for so long with one publisher means always having to do the same thing. My journey proves that this is not at all the case with GEOCONCEPT. Of course I am staying in the domain of geographic information systems, route optimization and geomarketing which are the 3 main strands of our product range. But designing applications that are going to be effective in meeting such a diverse range of client needs remains for me an absolutely fascinating intellectual challenge.
Lastly, GEOCONCEPT is not one of those companies with 1,000 employees. The company is very humane, in the true sense of the word, in terms of its size: everyone knows each other, works together, exchanges news: we keep in constant touch with one another, like an extended family.
Yes it certainly is, as in 1998 when I arrived, we were still very much grappling with the problematics of geography, data input, digitalization, and working to increase accuracy and precision…. GEOCONCEPT was a pioneer in bringing intelligence via the medium of geography, firstly to
It is fashionable to talk about AI and computers that do everything of their own accord. Rather than Artificial Intelligence I prefer to talk about apprenticeship. We are going to see more and more software that learns from its mistakes, that knows how to tell if the result is good from the user’s point of view, and to integrate this information to advantage. Our algorithms currently produce very good technical results. But it can happen that these results are not satisfactory for the end user. For example, in the domain of
The challenge for us, as a software publisher, is to upload and analsye all this information in a systematic way, within the limitations of GDPR, and other data regulations. The introduction of
For me, there are challenges every day. Always new problems to solve, things we have never come up against before and unique solutions to search for. The biggest challenge, as I was saying, is to create applications that are capable of learning and capitalising on what they do. For example, in