Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?

On HN there have been numerous interview horror stories that I just didn't understand. Recently though, I've been through one, so I think I understand what you have been through a bit better.

Interviews are done by people, trying to size you up. Even though their question would seem to be humilitating you can still try to make the best of them. As others have already posted, getting through the interview is a skill on itself and I have seen interviewees that passed full score and have been terrible to work with and vice versa.

The real question is: is this the only profession you care about? If so, it's time to learn to game the interview. If not, do feel free to give a shot at the other profession. It may benefit from your experience as a software developer.

As many have posted on HN before, interdisciplinary employees have higher employment value.

Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide.

You also don't need to know the answer in order to ask lots of clarifying questions. From the question alone, without an greater understanding of the landscape, I suspect the question is unsolvable.

The goal behind these questions is not for you to find the right answer, unless the interview is about a specific topic where you should know the right answer.

The goal is to have information on your thought process, how you solve problems, and how you communicate.

- Assumptions you have

- Your ability to clarify ambiguities

- Your interviewing skills: with coworkers, clients, reports, managers, applicants, you spend a lot of time interviewing people to extract meaning, facts, context, information.

- How you frame a problem

- How you behave in unfamiliar waters: you will build things you can't find the answer to on Stack Overflow or in a blog post.

- Your awareness of tradeoffs: do you make decisions being aware of the tradeoffs involved, do you have magical thinking, or cult of the tool/framework.

>"How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?". I had no idea, I have never handled that kinda scale.

Would you not like to tackle that problem and work on systems that handle that kind of scale? One argument against this is "who cares, they're not twitter so why are they talking about hypotheticals. They should interview me on what I'm going to do on the job". This is very valid, but there also is a counterpoint to this: this might stem from the desire of the interviewer not to be biased. If they quizz you on a problem they have been working on for the last year, they'll probably get frustrated by the fact you can't find the right answer to the questions. Or worse, they'd be impressed if you happen to find the exact solution they have converged to. You'll appear to be much much "smarter" than you are, and the expectations will be set high since you found the answer in a few minutes rather than a year. This is dangerous.

>I'm sorry if this is incoherent.

It's very coherent and understandable.

>I haven't even applied to jobs for weeks now, because in interviews I feel like I'm getting humiliated and I want to apologize and end them half-way.

We need to reframe this. If you put yourself in the shoes of whoever is interviewing you, they are trying to vet you because they care about their team, and they want to hire someone who will raise the bar of the team. From another perspective: if you were already in the team, wouldn't you want whoever is in charge of hiring to be an effective gatekeeper? Would you want a person who is impressed by an applicant spitting a few buzzwords and frameworks? That applicant then lands the job, gets assigned to your team, and becomes the reason you apprehend going to work? They may have been burned by past "bad" hires and have decided to tighten it up. People holding a team back, undermining decisions, commiserating while never explicitly voicing their concerns. This is a problem that must be prevented from happening, or dealt with swiftly if it happens.

Yes, they're not FAANGs but it's precisely that! They may be a small team in which you as a person are a large percentage of the workforce. If you are one in a team of 10, you represent 10% of the workforce. If you were at a FAANG, you'd represent a much smaller addition.

Furthermore, if it is a small team, it will hopefully grow, and you will take on more responsibilities, and you'll eventually hire people. They need to be very, very, disciplined about hiring people who will shape the future of the company.

It can be frustrating if you look at it from your perspective of someone who has a lot to offer and feeling humiliated, but that feeling is a very mutable reality once you factor in these different perspectives. Maybe even enjoy the interview, enjoy interacting with smart people, ask questions to learn new things, discover things you didn't know were a thing, and be glad for that team they have someone shielding them. You can ask them for feedback.

It is a fit that didn't happen between two pieces at a specific time and place. An impedance mismatch. If either of these changes, the fit could happen.

>I'm sure the problem is me, since other people are doing fine.

If one approaches it from a frame of rejection or humiliation, it can be extremely hard. This is like intimate relations. There are more productive and effective ways to approach these in terms of learning what you can from that interaction, wishing someone the best and to find someone who does it for them, fixing what is to be fixed, maintaining what is not to be "fixed", being courteous.

>* I need to draw a line and figure out some good indicators of when I should quit this industry, and anyone here who could give a few pointers on that, I would be thankful. I don't want to throw more time and resources into an industry where baseline expectations are something I can't/won't reach.*

OK, are you quitting the industry because you have a bad experience with the hiring process? If so, this can be fixed, and then if you want to quit, you can quit while in a good place.

Now, if even after that you still want to quit and you can't stand the "industry" anymore, you could amortize the experience you have and use it in your real passion. What's your real passion if you don't mind me asking?

There is a lot to be said for the entirety of your question, but i'll try to focus on this since it stood out to me (plus the interest of time):

>System design rounds require me to solve problems that the top engineers in the world spend months on. One question I was asked was "How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?". I had no idea, I have never handled that kinda scale. In fact most of my work experience is kinda vanilla and boring, so I generally have nothing much to draw on or much to talk about.

System Design rounds are going to be difficult. The idea isn't to give a correct, complete answer. It's to see how well you can reason about a hazy problem based on your current knowledge. Bram Cohen who wrote BitTorrent has this to say:

"My suggestion for learning software architecture is to practice. Obviously you can't practice it by doing hundreds of projects, because each one of them takes too long, but you can easily design a hundred architectures for problems which only exist on paper, and where you strive to just get the solution to work on paper. Start by modifying the requirements of a problem you're working on. What if the amount of bandwidth or CPU was a hundredth what it currently is? What if it were a thousand times? A million? What if you had a thousand times as much data? A million? A billion? What if the users were untrusted and you had to either prevent them from damaging the system or have a means of fixing things when they did? It doesn't matter if these scenarios are totally unrealistic, what matters is that they're different and that when you try to find architectures for handling them you take the inputs just as seriously as if you were about to start writing a system with those requirements for work. Try to find as many different approaches as you can, and come up with scenarios in which the stranger ones would be better." [1]

Secondly, "vanilla and boring" is a moving target. That question up there would for the most part be vanilla to senior backend developers, a little more than trivia and a waste of time.

You cannot say "I never handled that kinda scale". This is the wrong mindset to apply to any sort of problem solving. Start with what you know and get to the point where you have a list of knowns and unknowns. And for heavens sake, you have a massively powerful search engine. "Writing scalable systems" should be a query in your head right after you think "I don't know how to scale".

Talk about your vanilla and boring work. If you think it would make you feel better, focus on how it impacted the customers or whoever. It's perfectly fine to work on non-world changing things.

Lastly:

>I'll preface this by saying this field has never been my passion, just a profession I like.

Probably a healthy mindset, considering the amount of people in this field who chose it as a means of escapism from the hardships of every day life and convinced themselves in the process of coping with trauma that it's a passion. Passion isn't a requirement for good work, but some time spent learning the tech and being analytical in thinking about problems goes a long way.

And to answer your Q, ideally you should only quit if you don't like the day to day work and related reasons. Interviews don't represent this at all. It's mostly idiots on an ego trip.

[1] https://bramcohen.livejournal.com/4563.html

Twitter has changed this approach few times I guess, earlier it used to be simply insert tweet into a collection of tweets, and then when you load use timeline, look up the people they follow and find/merge those tweets. But it's going to create a lots of load on systems. Another approach is to maintain a cache of user's timeline(mailbox of tweets), when user posts a tweet, lookup all the people who follow that user, and insert the tweet into each or their timeline cache. results have be pre-computed, so less load. Both approaches fails when you have folks with lots of followers, so may be they use a hybrid of these approaches. this is Discussed in detail in "Designing Data-Intensive applications" book.