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

These days I contract so it never comes up - but I used to resist requests to help out with hiring other than putting in a good word if I know someone personally. I hated interviewing applicants as much as sitting interviews myself.

There’s not a great way to find out in fifteen to thirty minutes if someone is competent or a good fit so we resort to asking these nonsense questions because it’s the done thing. It’s a bit like Agile. There’s no good reason to do it, so we just do it until someone comes up with something else to do.

I do pretty well at interviews these days if only because I’m relaxed (contracts are usually short-to-mid term so I have a very “it’s just one gig” attitude and tend to crack jokes and ask about the team rather than the project - I’m pretty sure I can do the work, I’m not sure we’ll get along 8 hours a day so that’s more important for me to find out).

To your question, if you’re thinking about throwing in the towel - I wouldn’t if it’s just because of a problem of interviewing.

You have experience and are therefore clearly capable - but life’s short and as you’ve said it’s not your passion you might be happier doing something else.

So the best answer I could give you brings you back to where you started I’m afraid:

Only if you want to.

Denormalizing data refers to moving away from a model where you store one and only one copy of each ‘tweet’ in something like a relational database, to a model where you might actually store a separate copy of each tweet for each follower. That is kind of an extreme example of denormalization, but it’s a good way to illustrate how you could make it near-instant for any user to load their twitter homepage. If you stored the interesting tweets of every person I follow in a table just for me, you would make ‘reads’ (loading my homepage) incredibly cheap, but writes (someone with a lot of followers tweeting) very expensive.

Those trade offs exist everywhere in a system like this, which is (2), you get to decide when you do work. If celebrities with a million followers tweet an average of once a second, but people load their feeds a hundred thousand times a second, it is entirely acceptable to do 10000x more work for a celebrity tweet posting. This is actually the same concept behind using indexes in relational databases, but done more explicitly.

My personal answer to this question would probably start somewhat space-innefficient. I would take each tweet and put it into an event processing queue which writes a reference to it into each followers feed. This sounds nasty, but it scales with the number of writes, not reads, and we have less writes, and it scales linearly with the follower count of the writer. I would then improve efficiency by thinking about dormant accounts, caching, and maybe doing a bit more work on read.

But the funny thing is, I really feel more comfortable and confident than when I was “succeeding”. I used to feel so guilty about a one line code fix taking weeks to deploy, or I used to feel so guilty and terrible for not paying attention during scrum and refinement and all those meetings. I always felt like I was working too hard and not hard enough.

Farming has this reputation of just interminable toil and physical labor, combined with high costs for agro chemicals. But then you read about farmers like Gabe Brown or Chris Trump, idk.

It only takes three nonlinearities to create chaotic, non predictable behavior.