141–150 of 534 posts
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…
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
Acting like people can't be good at their job is frankly dehumanizing and says a lot about your mindset with how you view other fellow devs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No, the point was to demonstrate how you’d design a complex system. 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.
If the interview wants you to think about stuff that never happens in your role, I think it is a sign that in your role, you're expected to solve the problems like in the interview.
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…
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
So true...I've failed interviews, because the interviewee did see using library functions as a sign of weakness.
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.
The environment where the over-engineer tends to be promoted is one where the engineering department is (too) far separated from where the end users are. Think of very large organizations with walled departments, or organizations where there simply is not enough to do so engineers start to build stuff to fight non existing issues.
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…
I have 100% failed interviews by giving that answer when their definition of scale was 10,000!!!! req/sec. Like sorry dude in 2026 that's not much different than 10 req/sec and my original design would work just fine... But that's what happens when your interviewer is a "senior" 24 year old just reading off the prompt.
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…
I had this happen in a Google interview. I did back of the envelope math on data size and request volume and everything (4 million daily events, spread across a similar number of buckets) and very little was required beyond that to meet performance, reliability, and time/space complexity requirements. Most of the interview was the interviewer asking "what about" questions, me explaining how the simple design handled that, and the interviewer agreeing. I passed, but with "leans" vs. "strong" feedback.
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 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 ?