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Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
151–159 of 159 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#152Try applying for roles outside of tech companies if you haven't already. It can potentially be a lot less stressful while still being fulfilling and paying well.
I apply to insurance companies, banks etc, roles which are not glamorous.
Same deal there, in fact I just bombed another test. Had to do a whole bunch of things to a graph (4 part thing) in 45 minutes.
One look at the question and i knew I was toast.
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#153Sorry for going offtopic "How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?" Looks like the interviewer has atleast read the first chapter of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems" If you read and understand the above book, I am reasonably sure that you can crack most of the system design interviews.
And never again need that knowledge on the job you apply for.
Why do you think system design knowledge would not be used on the job? New systems are built all the time. Existing systems are extended/refactored all the time.
System design interviews IME are very applicable/productive actually. Especially ones that put you in a non-greenfield scenario.
Getting good at those requires studying topics that actually are relevant to the day to day job. The Kleppmann book referenced above is one of the bibles IMO. A software book that's actually worth the paper it's printed on.
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#154So thanks for the inputs.
I got that system design book, but i feel like algorithms and systems design together would require 3-4 months of preparation at least, and I am sure to lose my visa by then.
Some people asked me about my passion, I don't want to reveal that but it's something that normal people would consider 100x more competitive than software, and honestly, I don't feel that. It feels like I'm closer to making it in that than software.
In my passion, to get hired you get judged exactly on what you do, so it's trivial for me to get hired. Everyone asks for your portfolio, I have a good one, and that itself is a major foot in the door.
I am not sure if I will continue in the field, but I am sure what little interest I have in it is waning daily.
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can also anecdotally report code challenges seems to have become a lot more common in interviews recently. At least these are halfway representative of the job. It's a lot better than being told you're two inches tall, in a blender, and the blender's going to turn on in five seconds, what do you do.
I fly out. If they're going to make a completely unreal scenario, I'll use a completely unreal solution :)
i think that is the correct answer, reverse the blades and then jump over them so the air current forces you out like one of those indoor skydiving places
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#156> How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?".
On the receive side, sample the current time, subtract 2 seconds, and adjust the message time stamp to that.
The recipient of a message from a celebrity has no idea when it was actually sent; they are not engaged in a real-time chat with that celebrity via another channel.
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest hurdle for me to get the resume selected. How do people do that!?
It's easiest when the recruiter contacts you. So Linkedin profile, email on Github, etc. Starting out is hard, the first job really is the hardest, and I doubt recruiters are looking that hard. Once you have several recognizable, well-regarded companies on your resume (or Linkedin profile), even sending in your resume through an online submission will normally get you a callback. That, and you'll meet at these places…
I'm starting out. How can I make recruiter contact me?
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#158As someone who might quit the software industry myself (after 30+ years) very soon, I can give you a lot of reasons why that might be a reasonable decision ... but the interview process, as bad as it often is, isn't one of them. There are still places that haven't succumbed to the mania for interview processes that are supposedly meant to minimize false positives and/or eliminate bias but have really become more of a…
How come you might quit the industry?
In a nutshell, because I feel like I can. I've done this for a long time, often at high intensity, and I'm feeling like it's time to do something else. Almost everyone will get to this point sooner or later, no matter how passionate they were when younger. The relevant part is that pursuing one's possibly-non-remunerative dreams becomes a lot easier when you're sitting on years' worth of income from working in tech. Quitting too early foregoes that opportunity.
Re: Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't work at twitter, but one thing you can know for sure is that the tweet needs to be distributed to multiple machines to meet this performance requirement. A single machine probably could probably send three million trivial messages in three seconds, but if you mix in any business logic it's not gonna happen. What I'd do is have a shared highfanout queue. Once you have more than say 10k followers your tweets go…
Follow up question for a little clarification. Would you write the tweet into the queue once or append a message to the queue for each follower containing the tweet id? Seems to me you’d need to do the latter right? That way you ensure you process each follower at least once, but each worker doesn’t need to be aware of others it’s just pulling messages from the queue.
I don't think so. Maybe for the active users, but maybe not even then. Most twitter users are inactive and so you wouldn't want to fan that kind of data out so widely. You'd either have to pay enormous gc costs or enormous storage costs for someone like Donald Trump (0.5 GB per tweet assuming 64 bit tweet IDs). But I think I would just have a sharded in memory cache of recent tweets for the big dogs and if someone loads their feed you would do lookups into the sharded db for each subscription. You'd then cache the feed for the user so you don't have to do that lookup very often.
If you were going to write, you'd write into the cache, rather than persisting anything to disk. That's my guess at least.