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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
111–120 of 534 posts
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think this is often true and it's the limiting factor that prevents complexity from spiraling out of control. But there's also a certain type of engineer who generates Rube Goldberg code that actually works, not robustly, but well enough. A mad genius high on intelligence and low on wisdom, let's say. This is who can spin complexity into self reward.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#113I 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…
> you also understand what the point of the interview is
Exactly, it's also a test of ability to conform. Especially useful to weed out rogue behavior picked up in startups.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#114Sure 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.
Those verbs (reduced, decreased, increased) all assume the situation was "bad" already. Avoiding that in the initial design is what's poorly rewarded. Building a system that's fast on day one will not usually be rewarded as well as building a slow system and making it 80% faster.
Yes, and ironically there are promotion ladders that explicitly call out "staff engineers identify problems before they become an issue". But we all know that in reality no manager-leader is ever going to fix problems eagerly, if they even agree with someone's prediction that that thing is really going to become a problem.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#115I 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…
It's a culture fit question. When the culture is 'make everything ourselves' you're not a great culture fit. When the culture is 'just solve the problem', you fit in perfectly well.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#116I 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.
This! It’s better to assume that you don’t know some context than go with what appears to be the most pragmatic answer. Even in the real world.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably that you didn't want the job? At least from the point of view of the interviewer, this was the point where they should give you a polite "hey, play along" nudge.
> At least from the point of view of the interviewer, this was the point where they should give you a polite "hey, play along" nudge. That may be the game, but we all know it's bullshit, and we shouldn't be playing along. If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance cost…
> If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance costs of software
All interviews are contrived / artificial situations: The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes. Furthermore, we're getting Bilsbie's (op) take on the situation, there may be context that the interviewer forgot to mention or otherwise Bilsbie didn't understand / remember.
Specifically, if (the hypothetical situation) is a critical business process that they need an audit log of; or that they want to scale, this becomes an exercise in demonstrating that the candidate knows how to collect requirements and turn a manual process into a business application.
The interviewer could also be trying to probe knowledge of event processing, ect, ect, and maybe came up with a bad question. We just don't know.
Given that Bilsbie can't read their interviewer's mind, there's no way to know if that's what the interviewer wanted, or if the interviewer themselves was bad at interviewing candidates.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#118I keep reading this online but never encounter it in real life. People I work with and for like simple solutions that don't add complexity. It saves them time and money. I really wonder how is it that some people seem to encounter this toxic mentality so much that they assume it is universal. Is it a FAANG/US culture thing where everyone acts based on corrupted incentives?
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#119Earlier 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?
I dont even think you need to be neurodivergent or anything to answer this question like the parent’s cofounder did.
From one side, we call ourselves problem solvers, on the other hand we are not satisfied with simple solutions to these problems. If im interviewing for a job, i should be expected to behave and solve hypothetical problems the way id do it on the job. If that screws up your script, you probably suck at hiring and communicating your expectations.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#120I 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…
> 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.