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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#221

Post by colliv431 »

zipy124 wrote: post #81
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 mean you gave the right answer imho. Software engineers are just business people whose main tool is coding. You know you're good if you don't reach for the hammer when you don't have a nail.

[dead]

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#222

Post by surrTurr »

Well you do get promoted for simplicity if you outperform others, who do things too complicated.

For example, person A implements the simple solution, gets the project done faster while person B over engineers, has seemingly impressive stuff to talk about but at the end of the day doesn't ship.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#223

Post by jghn »

wongarsu wrote: post #127
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…

If the point of the interview was to test if the candidate can design something that can handle google-scale problems then maybe the interviewer shouldn't state throughput and availability requirements that can be satisfied by postgres

It's both.

As a hiring manager I've had situations like this arise because there was a gap in my plan and I didn't realize it. When those come up, we thank them for their cleverness, apologize to the candidate, reframe the situation, and give them another shot.

But also sometimes I leave intentional ambiguity in the plan. Part of the goal is to see if they have a degree of common sense commensurate to their level. If they're interviewing for a high level position, I'd expect them to be able to spot silly flaws and push back that perhaps the whole problem needs rethinking. And of course, I also expect them to know the brute force solution as well. Do they only know one? Both? Let's fine out.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#224

Post by mathgladiator »

There is a balancing point.

At core, complexity is derived from discovery of demand within those pesky complex humans.

Simplicity is the mechanism of finding common pathways within the mess of complexity of a product.

the tragedy is that simplicity is very expensive and beyond most organizations ability to support (especially since it can slow down demand discovery), and this is one of the allures of big tech for me. I was greatly rewarded and promoted for achieving simplicity within infrastructure.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#225

Post by whattheheckheck »

dude250711 wrote: post #32
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…

It's a bad time to be an altruistic perfectionist, tell you what. Avoid hands-on tech/team lead positions like hell.

Thats the kind of thinking that got us into this mess... scab

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#226

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

“There’s no right answer we just want to see how you think” is gaslighting if there is a right answer and wrong answer.

This should go straight to the DOL, EEOC, FTC and other bodies as some form of abusive labor practice that excises it from the employment process under threat of economic sanctions

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#227

Post by mrweasel »

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…

There's also the operational cost of running whatever is churned out. I wouldn't exactly blame that on AIs, but a large contingency of developers optimize for popular tech-stacks and not ease of operations. I don't think that will change just because they start using AI. In my experience the AI won't tell you that you're massively overbuilding something or that if we did this in C and used Postgresql we'd be able to run this on an old Pentium III with 4GB of RAM. If you want Kubernetes and ElasticSearch, you'll get exactly that.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#228

Post by rawgabbit »

jimmydddd wrote: post #213
Aurornis wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres might have been a perfect answer, but the candidate needs to explain why and how. The purpose of the interview is for the candidate to demonstrate their thought process and ability to communicate it. “Just use Postgres” doesn’t do that. This would be more obvious if it was a LeetCode problem and the candidate just regurgitated an algorithm from memory without explaining anything about it. Yeah it’s technical…

I went to law school and a few of us students were engineers. For our first set of essay exams, the professors all instructed us to "just answer the legal question" and not include extra analysis. After the exam, many of the engineers didn't do well because the professors *actually* wanted you to weave the whole sylabus into your answer (i.e., discuss hypotheticals that were not actually part of the question asked),…

This is also what I learned the hard way. In many situations the customer doesn’t say what they really want. There are a lot of reasons why. I usually have to write down a lot of hypotheticals. If X is the primary concern, we should do Y. If U is the issue, we should do V.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#229

Post by danenania »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #171
PKop wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it's a good answer and shows good instincts, but they still want to know how he would design a system if one was necessary. There's no need to be ridiculous about any of this from either perspective, which is why it should never have been a "fail" without the original interviewer simply saying "That's a solid answer now tell me what you would do if you had to build something new". I mean look how much time he was…

If the numbers can be satisfied by a Postgres then thats the correct answer. The interviewers fucked up, because they sized the problem wrongly. This is the same issue that was prevalent when the industry switched from HDD to SSD: some system design questions suddenly became trivial, because the IOPS went up by magnitudes. This is not a failure of the interviewees, who correctly went with the times, but a failure of…

The correct answer is “Postgres would handle it, but if it needed to scale even higher, I’d…”

The point of a system design interview is to have a discussion that examines possibilities and tradeoffs.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#230

Post by getnormality »

flubijeq wrote: post #219
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…

The best way to get promoted at stripe is just self-marketing and social manipulation. Good engineers are leaving meanwhile tecnical leadership is being replaced with designers and marketers. Internal performance metrics are heavily manipulated as well. Patrick has completely surrounded himself with extreme sycophants at this point - he has no idea what is actually going on in his company beyond curated metrics produ…

Patrick Collison sounds like a lovely, trusting, scientifically-minded man who needs to learn the constructive power of destruction. The power of rage and contempt for bad solutions and bad communication (regardless of intent).

With a smiley face front-end, of course. Wouldn't want to seem not-nice!

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