121–130 of 534 posts
> The interviewer is like: “What about scalability? What if you have ten million users?”
This reminded me of how much more fun I find it to work on software that always only has one user, and where scaling problems are related solely to the data and GUI interaction design.
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…
> 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.
If a valid answer was “just use Postgres” then it just wasn’t a very good interview question.
In real life, the answer almost certainly would be “just use Postgres” and everyone would be happy.
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…
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…
Most people forget that the early web was built in server closets on-site handling hundreds of requests per second. The business was sold hyperscalers because devs wanted more servers and were tired of arguing WHY they wanted more servers. Then they got sold on Highly Available services because every second you're down is a dollar, or more, lost. Nobody mentioned that the cost of building and maintaining it costs mor…
One common example I cite is at one job I owned Kafka and RabbitMQ clusters. Zero consideration was given to message size recommendations and we had incidents on the regular because some application was shoving multi-hundred megabyte messages into RMQ. They'd do other stupid shit like not ack their messages which would cause them to never be removed from local disk. This was a huge org, public company, hiring "only the best and brightest".
Management endlessly just threw more hardware at it rather than make the engineers fix their obviously bad architecture. What a headache. Some companies take the "prioritize engineer happiness" thing right off a cliff.
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…
People always overcomplicate this. Companies want to get the most out of their employees, for the least amount of money paid. Promotions are supposed to incentivise people to stay, rather than leave. If the company never promoted anyone, people would leave. So there needs to be a path for promoting people. But that process doesn’t have to be transparent, or consistent, or fair - in-fact it rarely is. You promote peop…
It's really not that simple. Numerous times I've seen promotions going to people who were visible but didn't do the actual work. Those who share the achievements on Slack, those who talk a lot, get to meetings with directors, those who try to present the work.
1. Do I consistently deliver more (in output, impact, or reliability) than peers at my pay level?
2. Is my work visible and tied to meaningful business outcomes, rather than low-impact tasks?
3. Am I known as dependable and easy to work with, especially under pressure?
4. Would the company feel a real loss-operationally or financially-if I left?
5. Have I made myself clearly more valuable to the organization than what I currently cost?
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…
Earlier 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.
In general, I agree that you can and should judge (not necessarily measure) thing like simplicity and good design. The problem is that business does want the "increased this by 80%, decreased that by 27%" stuff and simplicity does not yield itself to this approach.
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…
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 to be in a position again where no one in the whole place knows how something works while the higher-ups are having a meltdown because something critical broke.
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…
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