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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#181

Post by praptak »

eunos wrote: post #120
tyre wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> okay, well yes you might be right but you also understand what the point of the interview is. So the point is? I honestly dont understand.

The point is the interviewers are sometimes obtuse.

Sometimes the point of the interview is to see if the candidate knows an existing solution and "just use postgres" is the good answer. Sometimes it's to test the technical chops and pretending postgres doesn't exist is the point.

The candidate shouldn't be expected to always guess right, unless the position says "a psychic". The interviewer should notice if the candidate is solving the wrong kind of problem and nudge them in the right direction instead of punishing the candidate for the wrong guess.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#182

Post by Steve16384 »

portly wrote: post #69

Maybe I am naive but I still believe that simplicity leads to personal wins in the long run. Having simpler system designs lead to velocity and eventually you become known as the "team that can deliver".

Or, the team that everyone takes for granted and/or the pointy-haired bosses assume their project must be pretty basic and anyone can do it.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#183

Post by checkmatez »

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

It's hard to keep things simple. Management should be mindful of that and encourage engineers to follow YAGNI, to do refactorings that remove more code than they add, etc.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#184

Post by lucianbr »

LandR wrote: post #150
eunos wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> okay, well yes you might be right but you also understand what the point of the interview is. So the point is? I honestly dont understand.

The point isnt to give a simple answer, even if it's a correct answer. The point is show how much you know and how smart you are. The question is framed to you as a way for you to show you know x, y and z and talk about x, y and z. Even if a valid solution is just do a, that's great. But the interviewer has no idea if you actually know about x ,y and z do they ?

> The point is show how much you know and how smart you are.

I like that this sentence can be read both as a productive, well-meaning view on interviews, as well as a highly cynical one.

Also makes me wonder if the person will keep showing how much they know and how smart they are after they are hired, and if that is a good thing.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#185

Post by wadadadad »

Aurornis wrote: post #170
wongarsu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the point of the interview was to test if the candidate can design something that can handle google-scale problems then maybe the interviewer shouldn't state throughput and availability requirements that can be satisfied by postgres

Postgres might have been a perfect answer, but the candidate needs to explain why and how. The purpose of the interview is for the candidate to demonstrate their thought process and ability to communicate it. “Just use Postgres” doesn’t do that. This would be more obvious if it was a LeetCode problem and the candidate just regurgitated an algorithm from memory without explaining anything about it. Yeah it’s technical…

100% interviews are about communication and demonstrating thought process; after going through some rounds of interviewing candidates myself, any candidate who can adequately explain what they're thinking and how they arrive at their conclusions will be able to demonstrate their skills much more thoroughly than 'just use Postgres'.

That being said, it's also on the ones giving the interviews to push the candidates and ensure that they really are receiving the applicants best. The interviewers don't want to miss potentially great candidates (interviews are hard and nerve-wracking, and engineers aren't known for their social performance), and thus sometimes need to help nudge the candidates in the right direction.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#187

Post by BloondAndDoom »

Niko901ch wrote: post #21

AI coding tools are making this problem worse in a subtle way. When an agent can generate a "scalable event-driven architecture" in 5 minutes, the build cost of complexity drops to near zero. But the maintenance cost doesn't. So now you get Engineer B's output even faster, with even more impressive-sounding abstractions, and the promotion packet writes itself in minutes too. Meanwhile the actual cost - debugging, onb…

This is something I keep thinking while coding with AI, and same with introducing library dependencies for the simplest problems. It’s not whether how quickly I can get there but more about how can I keep it simple to maintain not only for myself but for the next AI agent.

Biggest problem is that next person is me 6 months later :) but even when it’s not a next person problem how much of the design I can just keep in my mind at a given time, ironically AI has the exact same problem aka context window

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#189

Post by austin-cheney »

The name of the game is framing. You don't talk about simplicity, because most people don't really understand what simplicity is. They falsely equate it to easy.

Instead you talk about how you complete all your tasks and have so much bandwidth remaining compared to all your peers, the beneficial results of simplicity. Being severely under used while demonstrating the ability to do 2x-10x more work than everybody else is what gets you promoted.

In this vein simplicity is like hard work. Nobody gives a shit about hard work either. Actually, if all you have to show is how hard you work you are a liability. Instead its all about how little you work provided and that you accomplish the same, or more, than everybody else.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#190

Post by ziml77 »

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 mean that's not really a good answer because you need to ask why they are sending a spreadsheet back and forth. Like yeah using a shared spreadsheet saves them having to email back and forth, but it doesn't help formalize the process, include validations, or make the data available to other systems. And maybe it would turn out that none of that is actually helpful in this case, but if you don't make an effort to ask and understand what's going on then you won't know if there's some bigger problem that needs addressing.
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