Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 534 posts

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#341

Post by strix_varius »

upofadown wrote: post #315

I actually got a job for deleting code. I was fixing a problem on a contract and noticed that I could fix the problem by getting rid of the section that contained the problem. The functionality could be provided in a much simpler way. Later the company created a position and I was given first refusal before they interviewed anyone. It was a 8 bit embedded application in something like 10k of code. When I left I gener…

That sounds like good work & a good outcome. I think there may be one ingredient left though to this:

> You have to write things up.

...and someone has to read it who understands the value you brought by deleting complexity.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#342

Post by MarcelOlsz »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #291
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

tbh codebases like that predate AI code generators. I had one job where my predecessor was not a very good developer by modern standards, but he was productive... a dangerous combination.

I also kind of respect it, it bothers me endlessly when everything isn't perfect and this guy just threw caution to the wind. Jokes on me as I'm working for him now. But it's not like anything that predates AI, I couldn't write this type of slop if I tried lol. Zero formatting, linting, or anything. Just straight goulash.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#343

Post by EthanHeilman »

jb3689 wrote: post #309
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.…

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?

Complete agreement. "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?"

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#344

Post by jppope »

The article's point is sound, but its missing a key component. People who build simpler systems are capable of getting more done - the build takes less, the maintenance takes less, etc. So when the engineer choosing simplicity is looking to get promoted they might have 3 or 4 bullet points to their name instead of 1.

Of course, over-simplification is the wrong decision some times, the same as abstraction and complexity is the wrong decision some times...

Your shortcut for promotion is generally building value for the company, but people need to remember that promotions support the business and they aren't free to the company.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#345

Post by alistairSH »

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…

Completely idiotic on the part of the interviewer. Failing somebody for a correct answer - what a waste of everybody's time. If you want the candidate to pursue a particular technical path, tell them to do so while they're there in the office.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#346

Post by Schiendelman »

andix wrote: post #339
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…

> When an agent can generate a "scalable event-driven architecture" in 5 minutes Currently they can't. Anyone with a basic understand of sw engineering will find numerous issues with the result of such a prompt within minutes.

But the product manager who asked for it won't realize that.

Unless you hire good TPMs!

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#347

Post by alistairSH »

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?

Apparently some combo of kissing the arse and reading the mind of the interviewer...

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#348

Post by austin-cheney »

pretzellogician wrote: post #281
austin-cheney wrote: post #189

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…

Except you spend extra time making your code simple, rather than slapping together something that requires extra maintenance from the eventual owners. Ideally we need metrics saying, "my projects require 30% less support or 50% less brainpower than comparable projects". Things like "average cyclomatic complexity", etc.

Simplicity is like any form of automation in that there is always an expensive upfront cost. The automation pays for itself by reducing time per interval, so its only a matter of when break even occurs as derived by the savings per interval multiplied by intervals in a given frequency.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#349

Post by saulpw »

jppope wrote: post #344

The article's point is sound, but its missing a key component. People who build simpler systems are capable of getting more done - the build takes less, the maintenance takes less, etc. So when the engineer choosing simplicity is looking to get promoted they might have 3 or 4 bullet points to their name instead of 1. Of course, over-simplification is the wrong decision some times, the same as abstraction and complexi…

Unfortunately, no, simpler systems often take longer to create. It's always easiest to just add some janky widget hanging off the side, than to rejigger the whole system to be simpler. It's like the Pascal quote: "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."

They take less to review and maintain etc, but the credit for those positives aren't assigned to the original engineer. Which is the point of the article.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#350

Post by inaros »

alistairSH wrote: post #345
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…

Completely idiotic on the part of the interviewer. Failing somebody for a correct answer - what a waste of everybody's time. If you want the candidate to pursue a particular technical path, tell them to do so while they're there in the office.

That is why they say, as a candidate, you are also interviewing the company you would be working for...
Post reply on HN