291–300 of 534 posts
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Simplicity is a driver for better abstractions. But now with AI, will we even develop new abstractions?
I was in charge of cleaning up a slop codebase by someone who has barely even heard of 'coding' before. Let's just say, it was abstract .
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…
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.…
Adjacent to it are PR reviews. Suggesting simpler approach in PR almost always causes friction: work is done and tested, why redo? It also doesn't make a good promotion material: keeping landscape clear of overengineered solutions is not something management recognises as a positive contribution.
Of course, if it's the person in charge introducing said overengineering there is a problem.
The name of the game is framing . You don't talk about simplicity, because most people don't really understand what simplicity is. They falsely equate it to easy. Instead you talk about how you complete all your tasks and have so much bandwidth remaining compared to all your peers, the beneficial results of simplicity. Being severely under used while demonstrating the ability to do 2x-10x more work than everybody els…
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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.
Then, there are hiring managers that suck and you might be discarded because you didn't follow the script. Sure, but that's a bullet you dodged.
In the FAANGs I've worked at, engineers who come from scrappy companies and implement hacks (Like the example of emailing spreadsheets around) undermine the business and will cost the productivity of thousands of people.
However, at the startups I've worked at, the folks from big companies that try to implement a super complex thing (e.g. exotic databases, overly ambitious infrastructure) The results are equally catastrophic for a company attempting to bootstrap when the complexity is so far removed from their core business.
What makes an experienced engineer is recognizing both states, understanding what works where and making the right trade-offs, usually from experience you can't fake your way through. I've seen a lot of projects that took 10-20 engineers 18 months to so we could sell something that landed a $100M contract with a customer. You see that enough times and you won't bias as hard against complexity. But of course it's situation dependent, like anything.
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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
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Maybe a better way to handle "minimize cyclomatic complexity" would be to set an agent in a loop of code metrics, refactor, test and repeat.
Good idea. Am still a bit shy around token budget spend.
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Sorry, I didn't get it. What was the 'right' answer?
distributed virtual abstract factory
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...