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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#191

Post by bandrami »

slfnflctd wrote: post #129
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…

> now nobody fully understands what was generated To be fair, a lot of the on call people being pulled in at 3am before LLMs existed didn't understand the systems they were supporting very well, either. This will definitely make it worse, though. I think part of charting a safe career path now involves evaluating how strong any given org's culture of understanding the code and stack is. I definitely do not ever want…

This. I've been a sysadmin for a quarter of a century and have professionally written next to no software. I've debugged every system I've had to support at some point though. It's a very different skill set.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#192

Post by bluGill »

Traster wrote: post #96
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.

Is it? I have long thought that most things business people are using a spreadsheet for belongs someplace else. They are easy ways to run quick what-ifs or make lists, but generally the right answer is update the system so they don't need a spreadsheet. If the data is financials - why can't your accounting system give everyone the view they need from the shared system? Othertimes what they really need are a database to track this. But a spreadsheet is easy and so they ignore all the problems it creates because it needs a real engineer (and often more money than they can spend) to create the right solution.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#193

Post by mrweasel »

Folcon wrote: post #97
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…

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?

It's probably more about your mindset, than about being neurodivergent vs. neurotypical. If you care more about maintainability and operations, there's a whole host of solutions you'd never built.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#194

Post by shafyy »

yudhiyudhi wrote: post #65
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.

Neither do most humans writing such code, i have seen llms generate better code than 90% of coders I have seen in the last 20 years

Please let's stop with the "but some humans also suck at this so it's ok if LLMs also suck at it" argument. It doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#195

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

winwang wrote: post #84
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.

What about someone inexperienced but skeptical, using AI to learn + fix their own code before opening the PR?

That's an interesting question ... how should a less experienced developer use AI productively, and learn while developing? Certainly using it as a magic genie and vibe coding something you are in no position to evaluate is not the way to go, nor is that a good way for anyone to use AI if you care about the quality or specifics of the end result!

There's always going to be some overlap, wanting to use a new skill/library in a production system, but maybe in general it's best to think of learning and writing/generating production code as two separate things. AI is great for learning and exploration, but you don't want to be submitting your experiments as PRs!

A good rule of thumb might be can you explain any AI-generated design and code as well as if you had written it yourself? If you don't fully understand it, then you are not in a good position to own it and take responsibility for it (bugs, performance, edge case behavior, ease of debugging, flexibility for future enhancement, etc).

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#196

Post by ghosty141 »

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 very much agree with that, I had the same thought a few days ago.

I feel/am way more productive using chatgpt codex and it especially helps me getting stuff done I didn't want to get started with before. But the amount of literal slop where people post about their new vim plugin that's entirely vibecoded without any in-depth thinking about the problem domain etc. is a horrible trend.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#197

Post by tedggh »

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…

Yours was a clever answer to a stupid question. Tech interviewers need to leave college behind and start treating candidates as professionals. Puzzles, white boarding and riddles are unique to software engineering roles, you would never see a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or engineers in other disciplines going through any of this nonsense. These methods are proven to be a poor predictor of job performance. In my last role as lead engineer we would chat with the candidate over lunch about random topics. We first wanted to see if they would fit our team. Then in the afternoon let them work in a little project that was actually part of active development. This way we discovered that most candidates who went through the screening process could actually be pretty good team members. Our issue was having to decide who to give the offer to, while other companies keep rejecting candidates over bubble sort. Our attrition was also pretty low. So it happens that software engineers will surprise you when you treat them as grown ass adults. Who would have guessed?

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#198

Post by fluidcruft »

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…

Maybe you were supposed to identify what business need they were trying to solve and see if there was anything better than a spreadsheet?

Spreadsheets are a tricky one some people like the power and automomy they have with spreadsheets.

But more often spreadsheets are the only way to transfer data between solos and it wastes a lot of time and is error-prone.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#199

Post by LPisGood »

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 feel like you could start waxing poetic about engineering value of meeting people where they are, not reinventing the wheel, etc.

Then after a brief discussion of that you could actually ask if the purpose of the question was for you to design a system to handle that situation and jump into the design.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#200

Post by wccrawford »

badosu wrote: post #123
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…

Sorry, I didn't get it. What was the 'right' answer?

"Postgres, because..."

They want a conversation to see how you think, not an actual answer.

Which is stupid, because they asked a question that the person didn't need to think to answer. So they didn't get to see them think.

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