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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#151

Post by renegade-otter »

tyre wrote: post #91
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…

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 always find it funny that "engineers" straight out of school who barely know how to create a PR are expected to "ace" planet scale design questions. It's. Just. So. Dumb.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#152

Post by nobleach »

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…

Way back when I was in IT Admin, I used to have this problem all the time. Some non-tech person emails a spreadsheet, another non-tech person edits it, and saves it. The original person complains that they can't see the changes. Yeah, because it's saved in some MS Windows Profile location that no sane human would ever visit. My solution was to ONLY email links to shared files on a shared resource. The LAST thing I'd ever think of is writing software to solve this problem!

These days if I were interviewing someone and they said, "I'd use the simple solution that is fairly ubiquitous", I'd say, "yes! you've now saved yourself tons of engineering hours - and you've saved the company eng money".

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#155

Post by pradn »

The problem can be complex, which sometimes means the solution needs to be complex. Often, you can solve a complex problem in simple ways. There’s many ways to do that:

a) finding a new theoretical frame that simplifies the space or solutions, helps people think through it in a principled way

b) finding ways to use existing abstractions, that others may not have been able to find

c) using non-technical levers, like working at the org/business/UX level to cut scope, simplify requirements,

The way you can make complexity work for your career, is to make it clear why the problem is complex, and then what you did to simplify the problem. If you just present a simple solution, no one will get it. It’s like “showing your work”.

In some orgs, this is hopeless, as they really do reward complexity of implementation.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#156

Post by random3 »

This has been a thought theme throughout my career and have a good set of scenarios I never ended up publishing.

It's not just the most "elaborate system". The same thing happens in so many other ways. For example a good/simple solution is one and done. Whereas a complex one will be an interminable cause of indirect issued down the road. With the second engineer being the one fixing them.

Then there's another pattern of the 10x (not the case with all 10x-ers) seeding or asked to "fix" other projects, then moving on to the next, leaving all the debt to the team.

It's really an amazing dynamic that can be studied from a game theoretical perspective. It's perhaps one of the adjacent behaviors that support the Gervais principle.

It's also likely going to be over soon, now that AI is normalizing a lot of this work.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#157

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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…

I think we'll see a decline of software as a product for this reason. If your job is to solve a problem, and you use AI to generate a tool that solves that problem, or you use money to buy a tool that solves that problem, well then it's still your job to solve that problem regardless of which tool you use.

But given how poorly bought software tends to fit the use case of the person it was bought for... eventually generate-something-custom will start making more and more sense.

If you end up generating something that nobody understands, then when you quit and get a new job, somebody else will probably use your project as context for generating something that suits the way they want to solve that problem. Time will have passed, so the needs will have changed, they'll end up with something different. They'll also only partially understand it, but the gaps will be in different places this time around. Overall I think it'll be an improvement because there will be less distance (both in time and along the social graph) between the software's user its creator--them being most of the time the same person.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#158

Post by anal_reactor »

tyre wrote: post #91
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…

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 realized that my manager really confuses complexity with robustness. Case in point: we have a very complicated script that runs at deployment time to determine the address of the database. It's been the source of a few incidents - database wasn't discovered because it was restarting and the script passed an empty string instead of stopping the deployment, script failed because of python update and empty configuration was passed, shit like that. I've been arguing "bro why can't we make terraform create a config file with all the addresses that is directly passed to the app at deployment, or better yet, just copy-paste the database addresses into a file in the repo because we change something there once a year at maximum" but my manager took it as a sign of incompetence and my inability to understand complex systems.

I feel like lots of people just follow the happy path and don't understand that complexity incurs real cost.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#159

Post by kaleidawave »

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…

The "coding benchmarks" should be based heavily biased on what dependencies they use etc. Reduced characters etc.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#160

Post by jasondigitized »

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…

What is the maintenance cost when Opus 6 or whatever is available?
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