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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#91

Post by tyre »

bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

So my cofounder was talking to Stripe about an acquihire (this was after I’d left.) As part of it, he had to do a systems design interview.

He got the prompt, asked questions about throughput requirements (etc.), and said, “okay, I’d put it all in Postgres.” He was correct! Postgres could more than handle the load.

He gets a call from Patrick Collison saying that he failed the interview and asking what happened. He explained himself, to which Patrick said, okay, well yes you might be right but you also understand what the point of the interview is.

They made him do it again and he passed.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#92

Post by tylerrooney »

I worked at Amazon 2005-2008 as a Software Dev Engineer. To hammer home company culture, there were two awards which could be awarded at the Quarterly All-hands meeting * The "Just Do It" Award which recognized someone just fixing some obvious problem at was in front of them but not responsibility * The "Door Desk" Award for frugality, named in honour of the basic door-frame-four-leg desk everyone worked on.

In many ways, the Door Desk award was for simplicity. I remember, one time, someone got an award for getting rid of some dumb operations room with some big unused LCD TVs. When you won these awards, you rarely got any kind of reward. It was just acknowledgement at the meeting. But that time, they literally gave the guy the TVs.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#93

Post by nyeah »

praptak wrote: post #53
codingdave wrote: post #2

Sure they do. You just need to spell it out in business terms, not tech terms: "Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%" Simplicity for its own sake is not valued. The results of simplicity are highly valued.

You can't measure the impact of not creating a steaming pile of complexity.

Really you can. You look at the engineers who create steaming piles, and you look at the ones who don't. Over a year or two, the difference is easy to spot. For people who care to spot it.

If there's no competent front-line technical management who can successfully make this simple comparison, then, sure, in that case the team may be fucked.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#94

Post by lccerina »

sdevonoes wrote: post #71
lccerina wrote: post #7

Dijkstra understood it 50 years ago, and again 26 years ago [1]. Nothing changes. Malpractice just propagate and there are zero incentives to build simple, small, and maintainable software. If the company you work for just push for unnecessary complexity, get out of there! Don't fold! [1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1305.PDF

> If the company you work for just push for unnecessary complexity, get out of there! Why? We learn all these cool patterns and techniques to address existing complexity. We get to fight TRexes… and so we get paid good money (compared to other jobs). No one is gonna pay me 120K in europe to build simple stuff that can work in a single sqlite db with a php fronted.

Except now we get websites that need to download 20-25MB of "latest cool framework" to show you a blurb of text because programmers before you created unnecessary complexity that needs to be maintained forever.

The honest opinion no one wants to hear is that programmers do not deserve the money they are paid for because MOST of the time what it's really needed is a "single sqlite db with a php frontend".

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#95

Post by wildekek »

bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

The lesson was that sometimes the interviewee can be more competent than the interviewer and they should run.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#96

Post by Traster »

bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

This is one of my favourite interview questions too. I ask a design question that technically could be solved using the specialist skillset I interview for but it would be insane to actually do that in the real world. It's a good opener to see how practical and open minded they really are.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#97

Post by Folcon »

tyre wrote: post #91
bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

So my cofounder was talking to Stripe about an acquihire (this was after I’d left.) As part of it, he had to do a systems design interview. He got the prompt, asked questions about throughput requirements (etc.), and said, “okay, I’d put it all in Postgres.” He was correct! Postgres could more than handle the load. He gets a call from Patrick Collison saying that he failed the interview and asking what happened. He e…

I feel like if that's the thought process, that should be stated up front

There's a ton of incredibly talented neurodivergent people in our ecosystem who would trip up on that question just because of how it's framed

Because how is the interviewee to know if you're testing for the technically sophisticated answer no one in their right mind would ever write or the pragmatic one?

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#98

Post by nyeah »

trjordan wrote: post #44

The push for simplicity can't be at the time of recognition. It has to be during the building, so that by the time the thing gets built, it's the simplest thing that met the need. Can you actually imagine a promo committee evaluating the technical choices? "Ok, this looks pretty complex. I feel like you could have just used a DB table, though? Denied." Absolutely not! That discussion happens in RFCs, in architecture…

>Can you actually imagine a promo committee evaluating the technical choices? "Ok, this looks pretty complex. I feel like you could have just used a DB table, though? Denied."

A committee with no skin in the game, who knows? But a manager who actually needs stuff done, absolutely.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#99

Post by darkwater »

klabb3 wrote: post #28
darkwater wrote: post #16

> Now, promotion time comes around. Engineer B’s work practically writes itself into a promotion packet: “Designed and implemented a scalable event-driven architecture, introduced a reusable abstraction layer adopted by multiple teams, and built a configuration framework enabling future extensibility.” That practically screams Staff+. > But for Engineer A’s work, there’s almost nothing to say. “Implemented feature X.…

> And if this simpler solution was actually better for the company, it should be highlighted[…] Simpler than what? The reason this phenomenon is so pervasive in the first place is that people can’t know the alternatives. To a bystander (ie managers), a complex solution is proof of a complex problem. And a simple solution, well anyone could have done that! Right? If we want to reward simplicity we have to switch refer…

I'm (also) an EM, I've been a pure EM in some roles in my career and I really struggle to understand these pain points that many people bring up. Isn't a manager job to know what their managees are focused on over a period of time? Shouldn't be they aware of the projects the team is working on? As EM and most probably previously engineers, shouldn't they know already why simple solutions are good?

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#100

Post by silveraxe93 »

vrosas wrote: post #70
domk wrote: post #20

One of our interviews is a technical design question that asks the candidate to design a web-based system for public libraries. It explicitly tests for how simple they can keep it, starting at "a single small town library" scale and then changing the requirements to "every library in the country". The top ever performance was someone who answered that by estimating that even at max theoretical scale, all you need a m…

I have 100% failed interviews by giving that answer when their definition of scale was 10,000!!!! req/sec. Like sorry dude in 2026 that's not much different than 10 req/sec and my original design would work just fine... But that's what happens when your interviewer is a "senior" 24 year old just reading off the prompt.

10,000!!!! is such a huge number I don't think we could even represent with a computer.

Being obviously pedantic here, I agree with what you meant.

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