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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#301

Post by SolubleSnake »

bluGill wrote: post #192
Traster wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my favourite interview questions too. I ask a design question that technically could be solved using the specialist skillset I interview for but it would be insane to actually do that in the real world. It's a good opener to see how practical and open minded they really are.

Is it? I have long thought that most things business people are using a spreadsheet for belongs someplace else. They are easy ways to run quick what-ifs or make lists, but generally the right answer is update the system so they don't need a spreadsheet. If the data is financials - why can't your accounting system give everyone the view they need from the shared system? Othertimes what they really need are a database…

Argh gawd I hate this!

There are plenty of reasons that a department within a company will prefer spreadsheets. Software is not the answer to everything and also this is the same problem you get when Microsoft introduces those pesky 'Power App' developers etc or previously the Sharepoint 'web parts' etc....essentially someone who kind of feels they are the 'owner' of some information then decides to formalise the process in their own little way.

Now you have a person wasting a bit of time making their little tool but you've also got people complaining that someone's now essentially taken control of it etc. At a former employer our procurement team used spreadsheets to track basically everything but importantly everything on our PCBs - every single component and their suppliers and prices etc (various factories around China usually). This would have been a horrible thing to try and formalise in a web app just because of how often they were all changing their own conventions etc (often suppliers changing what information they gave to them, too). It would have been a wild goose chase to formalise it and more than the trouble it would be worth.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#302

Post by notepad0x90 »

You can sell simple solutions as complex by focusing on what they solve. No one has to know your solution is simple unless they're looking under the hood.

And complexity doesn't always sell better. A lot of times it might look like the whole thing is messy, or too hard to maintain, tech burden nightmare. Things that are simple might look complex and vice versa too, I think anyone who had to implement requirements from people who don't understand the implementation complexities will know this very well.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#303

Post by portly »

Steve16384 wrote: post #182
portly wrote: post #69

Maybe I am naive but I still believe that simplicity leads to personal wins in the long run. Having simpler system designs lead to velocity and eventually you become known as the "team that can deliver".

Or, the team that everyone takes for granted and/or the pointy-haired bosses assume their project must be pretty basic and anyone can do it.

But it frees up time to build more products, which could give you leverage for negotiating better pay.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#304

Post by darkwater »

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…

Honest question: did you really not read the room there? I mean, if I were on the interviewer side, asking that question, and getting an initial answer "Well, to be honest I would tell them to use GSheets because given the current situation is the highest benefits/costs solution, but for the sake of a system design interview I would also think about designing a bespoke internal solution that would use blah blah blah". You would get a "strong hire" evaluation and you would still be able to turn down the offer if you wanted because that question might have been a red flag to you.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#305

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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.

Yeah, I had no training on being an interviewer before I started doing interviews. My manager gave me some tips, and I came up with two security bug-hunt exercises (was hiring AppSec engineers), but that was it.

Now, I wonder if I had rejected earlier candidates that I would have passed if I was a better interviewer.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#306

Post by musesum »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #286
musesum wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea. Am still a bit shy around token budget spend.

I think this is at the moment the practical limitation to using AI for everything (and what the coding agents themselves also optimize for to some degree, or it's the slider they can play with for price vs quality, the "thinking" models being the exact same, but just burning more tokens).

Am waiting for the next Mac Studio to come out to experiment with the "AI for everything" approach. Most likely, the open source distilled models will lower quality. So, another "price vs quality" tradeoff. Still, will be fun to code like I'm at a foundation lab.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#307

Post by ImaneIdrissi »

It's great to choose simple solutions to avoid over-engineering, but at the same time you need to be able to talk about them in a way that proves making that choice was much more complex than picking the complex path directly. Listing both the complex solution and the simple one shows others that you reasoned about both and deliberately chose simplicity. It's all about framing the story behind the decision.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#309

Post by jb3689 »

munchbunny wrote: post #248
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…

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.…

A good interviewer won’t be looking for a single solution to the problem. I’d expect them to entertain the Google Sheets answer - it’s good signal that the candidate will consider what already exists in the world. I’d rather extend the problem: the team is spending considerable time iterating with manual entry, what would you do?

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#310

Post by david-gpu »

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.

> none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all

They trained us repeatedly not to bribe foreign government officials, even though I had zero access to anybody like that. There was also some mandatory training against harassing coworkers. I.e. "protect the company from lawsuits" training, not "here are some ideas for how to do your job more effectively" training. They were megacorps, too.

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