Nobody gets promoted for simplicity • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#251

Post by cindyllm » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

sovietswag wrote: post #249

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…

Ha! I just had a debate about this with my friend. A certain ferry company uses a big Google Sheet to track where all of its vessels are currently docked in their home port, as well as which employee is assigned to which vessel for the day, etc (it's very information dense with color coding, and employees check it daily to get their vessel assignment). My friend thought this was completely unacceptable for a big comp…

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#252

Post by kolja005 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

jcmontx wrote: post #242

Sad but true. I'm very strict with my developers and extremely cautious of introducing new "moving parts" to existing systems. I try to keep a single deployment-unit if possible. I like monoliths.

I just refactored a bunch of our microservices into a monolith. Fortunately the business justification was pretty straightforward because it was clear to all of us that the service architecture was weighing us down.

Since one of microservice's benefits is solving a coordination problem, now that teams are getting smaller due to AI, I wonder if we will see monoliths make a resurgence in some cases.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#253

Post by sejje » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

badosu wrote: post #123

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…

Sorry, I didn't get it. What was the 'right' answer?

nosql on serverless

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#254

Post by twodave » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

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…

This is just an indication that it's a poor interviewing technique. If you ask a question expecting the answer to be predictable then you had better cover all possible ambiguity in leading the candidate to the answer you want to hear. But then you're no longer asking the candidate to be creative, are you? As an interviewer I might be more inclined to allow such an answer and then follow up with questions of my own to test the limits of the candidate's knowledge of and confidence in Postgres as a technical choice for serving all the different constraints of the problem space. This way either I discover how well-reasoned the answer is or else (for a good candidate) it prompts them to adjust the design to better fit the problem. In no case would I expect they need to fit their answer into some key and then scold them for not playing along with my imaginary game.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#255

Post by Cthulhu_ » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #104

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 had a similar idea once when answering a Stack Overflow question[0]. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1831841/61938

I love how your answer was straight, to the point and leverages existing standards, then scrolled up to the question and had to go through someone else's thorough, multipage response. Full marks to both answers!

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#256

Post by Cthulhu_ » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

gorbachev wrote: post #145

robertlagrant wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar idea once when answering a Stack Overflow question[0]. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1831841/61938

Quoting your comment: "You definitely don't want to hire the person who thinks - bizarrely - that using library functions is a sign of weakness." So true...I've failed interviews, because the interviewee did see using library functions as a sign of weakness.

I just wish that in those cases the interviewee gives feedback and allows you to rewrite instead of just failing you. I mean in practice nobody writes library functions themselves unless absolutely necessary, but I get that for some positions you have to demonstrate that you can write lower-level code if you have to.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#257

Post by SurvivorForge » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

There's a related dynamic that I don't see discussed enough: simplicity is also harder to defend in design reviews because it looks like you didn't consider the edge cases. When someone proposes a three-table schema, the immediate question is "but what about X?" and the simple answer — "we handle X when X actually happens" — sounds like hand-waving compared to someone showing an elaborate diagram that accounts for every hypothetical scenario.

The irony is that the elaborate design usually handles those hypotheticals incorrectly anyway, because you can't predict real requirements from imagination. The simple version gets modified when real feedback arrives, and the modifications are cheaper because there's less architecture to work around.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#258

Post by bombolo » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

sovietswag wrote: post #249

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…

Ha! I just had a debate about this with my friend. A certain ferry company uses a big Google Sheet to track where all of its vessels are currently docked in their home port, as well as which employee is assigned to which vessel for the day, etc (it's very information dense with color coding, and employees check it daily to get their vessel assignment). My friend thought this was completely unacceptable for a big comp…

[dead]

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#259

Post by Cthulhu_ » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

wildekek wrote: post #95

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…

The lesson was that sometimes the interviewee can be more competent than the interviewer and they should run.

Run or email their seniors and ask them if they're hiring for higher-up positions.

But this is connected to another thread on HN about engineer/manager titles and how they basically have no value if you try to compare them between employers.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#260

Post by Cthulhu_ » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

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…

AI generators only generate that if you tell them to though - as a developer (especially senior) it's your job to know what you want and tell the AI coding tools that.