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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#271

Post by stahorn »

erelong wrote: post #261

Relatedly, I'm periodically thinking about the issue of people who prevent problems not being rewarded as much as those who become "heroes" for resolving avoidable situations I guess it may be important to underscore the value that simplicity provides over needless complexity or to sell people on the value of problems prevented rather than preventable catastrophes that were dealt with Maybe we could encourage a cultu…

The difference between the fire fighter and the fire safety inspector. The former puts out fires and saves lives and is of course a hero. The latter complains about things that never happen, wastes everybody's time and money and is generally annoying.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#272

Post by JDye »

We've had an interesting experience on the interviewing side of this. Asking a system design question and getting answers involving multiple layers of caching, pub/sub, event-driven whatever/etc.. when the real answer is to just use postgres. It handles the scale we're asking about. We know it, as that's what we use internally.

I've only worked at my startup so I can't comment on scale elsewhere, but if our simple architecture can handle 30k requests per second, I think it can handle most other companies scale too.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#273

Post by kittikitti »

When I'm on a team and there are multiple engineers and data scientists, many of them come from Big Tech: Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. I don't get any points with them for implementing a one-liner that does whatever Google implemented but they get very excited if I did. I get a "Oh wow, I know someone who worked on that at Google, I am really glad it's useful!"

This extends to suggesting huge licenses like from Salesforce. The Marketing and HR teams are ecstatic that they can purchase another license of their favorite software, they can go shopping! If I had implemented a free and more efficient CRM, there would be no networking effect.

This all builds systems that are vastly more expensive (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars), slower, and much harder to fix. YCombinator financially benefits from this and it's all very corrupt. Most of the time, I have to really gain the "soft skills" to activate the networking (nepotism) effects.

It's not about what you know, it's about who you know.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#274

Post by bcrosby95 »

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…

We have no idea if its a good solution or not. It depends upon, among other things: how long it takes to update it, the error rate, and how acceptable those errors are.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#275

Post by nsxwolf »

01284a7e wrote: post #270
munchbunny wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been both the interviewer and the candidate in this kind of situation, this is really a big interviewer training failure. The general way to handle this as an interviewer is really simple: acknowledge that the interviewee gave a good answer, but ask that for the purposes of evaluating their technical design skills that you'd like for them to design a new system/code a new implementation to solve this problem.…

While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer? I spent 10+ years doing interviews at all sorts of orgs (including Fortune 500s, government, etc.) without a single hour of interviewer training. Now that I think about it, none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all. Huh.

Sounds common to have training in big tech but I never received any training either. Sometimes we’d discuss changes we wanted to make to the interview process, which suppose could be considered adjacent to training.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#276

Post by philipallstar »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #255
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

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!

I do absolutely love the other answer!

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#277

Post by sefrost »

01284a7e wrote: post #270
munchbunny wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been both the interviewer and the candidate in this kind of situation, this is really a big interviewer training failure. The general way to handle this as an interviewer is really simple: acknowledge that the interviewee gave a good answer, but ask that for the purposes of evaluating their technical design skills that you'd like for them to design a new system/code a new implementation to solve this problem.…

While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer? I spent 10+ years doing interviews at all sorts of orgs (including Fortune 500s, government, etc.) without a single hour of interviewer training. Now that I think about it, none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all. Huh.

Same here. I receive a training budget at some places but it goes unspent. Everything is self directed learning in my own time.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#278

Post by munchbunny »

01284a7e wrote: post #270
munchbunny wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been both the interviewer and the candidate in this kind of situation, this is really a big interviewer training failure. The general way to handle this as an interviewer is really simple: acknowledge that the interviewee gave a good answer, but ask that for the purposes of evaluating their technical design skills that you'd like for them to design a new system/code a new implementation to solve this problem.…

While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer? I spent 10+ years doing interviews at all sorts of orgs (including Fortune 500s, government, etc.) without a single hour of interviewer training. Now that I think about it, none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all. Huh.

> While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer?

TL;DR: not enough training.

As a hiring manager, whenever we start a hiring period I have a conversation with my interviewer team about what qualities we're looking for and review the questions they plan to ask in order to normalize the process. Stuff like "what does a good answer look like, and why? what does a bad answer look like? is this something easy for a candidate to engage with or will you spend half the interview just explaining the background? is this coding question unreasonably hard?" and so on.

I also look at the evaluations that interviewers give relative to other interviewers. Almost every hiring cycle I've done I've had to deal with some interviewer (all over the seniority spectrum) asking unreasonably hard questions.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#279

Post by tracker1 »

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…

I'm there with you... maybe, maybe using the sheets API to create a simpler front end for very specific use cases, like an individual seeing their assignment for the day, or maybe texting everyone that info.

As much as people will rely on databse (rdbms/sql) backed applicatons, in the end a lot of the business world runs on spreadsheets... Not only that, but excel, and I'm assuming plenty of others have integration points for pulling data from other resources... Spreadsheet masters can do very impressive things with what appears to be a simple tool.

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