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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#101

Post by oblio »

wildekek wrote: post #95
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.

Or maybe this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247719

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#102

Post by jt2190 »

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 to learn is that in-house development groups are often incentivized to “sell” custom software solutions to their organizations, as their existence (budget) relies on it.

As an interviewee it’s important to try and identify whether the group you’re interviewing with operates this way, literally: How will they get the money to pay for your salary? That way you avoid giving nom-starter answers to interview questions.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#103

Post by bob1029 »

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…

> What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something?

I realize this is part of an interview game, but perhaps the best response is still to ask why this is a problem in the first place before you launch into a technical masterpiece. Force the counterparty to provide specific (contrived) reasons that this practice is not working for the business. Then, go about it like you otherwise would have.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#104

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

I had a similar idea once when answering a Stack Overflow question[0].

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1831841/61938

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#105

Post by bagacrap »

Actually I have seen successful promotion packets based on elimination of complexity. When maintenance of a complex system becomes such a burden that even a director is aware of it, "eliminating toil" is a staff level skill.

More than once I have seen the same project yield two separate promotions, for creating it and deleting it. In particular this happens when the timescale of projects is longer than a single engineer's tenure on a given team.

But yes, avoiding complexity is rarely rewarded. The only way in which it helps you get promoted is that each simple thing takes less time and breaks less often, so you actually get more done.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#106

Post by kurthr »

nhayfield wrote: post #64
shafyy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're kidding or not, but to write great maintable code, you need a lot of understanding that a LLM just doesn't have, like history, business context, company culture etc. Also, I doubt that in it's training data it has a lot of good examples of great maintainable code to pull from.

He isn't kidding. I have a directive to write the shortest, least complicated, readable business code and it makes a huge difference

Sometimes, as in the bilsbi's top level comment, the solution is to use a free tool/library/product that already exists. The solution is not always to write new code, but the agent will happily do it.

Maybe that's "the manager's job", but that's just passing the buck and getting a worse solution. Every level of management should be looking for the best solution.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#107

Post by chuckadams »

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 followup questions usually help, like: "What are they tracking?" and "What are the problems caused by using a spreadsheet?" That usually gives you a clue of the answer they're looking for. The answer might be bullshit, but you pass an interview by playing their game, not yours.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#109

Post by bagacrap »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #56

I forget who said it, but it seems that AI is basically an amplifier of the talents (or lack of them) of whoever is wielding the tool. In the hands of an experienced developer/designer, AI will help them achieve a good result faster. In the hands of someone inexperienced, out of their depth, AI will just help them create a mess faster, and without the skill to assess what's been generated they may not even know it.

I am the type of engineer who prefers simplicity and I have not found a way to make AI increase the simplicity of code I'm working on. If left to its own devices, Claude absolutely loves adding more member variables, wrapper functions, type conversions, rather than, say, analyzing and eliminating redundancies. So my experience is that AI is more closely aligned with the engineer type for whom the solution is always "add more code", rather than whatever its human manager would do.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#110

Post by neftaly »

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…

I would ask, why are they emailing it? Maybe there's a good reason they can't use sheets.
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