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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#361

Post by dirk94018 »

Simplicity is hard. Mark Twain's 'I would have written less had I had more time' at the end of a letter comes to mind.

Software dev's tendency to build castles is great for technical managers who want to own complex systems to gain organizational leverage. Worse is better in this context. Even when it makes people who understand cringe.

You would think that things not breaking should be career-positive for SysAdmins, SREs, and DevOps engineers in a way it cannot be for software devs. But even there simplicity is hard and not really rewarded.

Unix philosophy got this right 50 years ago — small tools, composability, do one thing well. Unix reimagined for AI is my attempt to change that.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#362

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

vrosas wrote: post #70
domk wrote: post #20

One of our interviews is a technical design question that asks the candidate to design a web-based system for public libraries. It explicitly tests for how simple they can keep it, starting at "a single small town library" scale and then changing the requirements to "every library in the country". The top ever performance was someone who answered that by estimating that even at max theoretical scale, all you need a m…

I have 100% failed interviews by giving that answer when their definition of scale was 10,000!!!! req/sec. Like sorry dude in 2026 that's not much different than 10 req/sec and my original design would work just fine... But that's what happens when your interviewer is a "senior" 24 year old just reading off the prompt.

> 10,000!!!! req/sec

I've forgotten how to count that low.

I'm gonna need a Kubernetes cluster with a distributed database with a caching layer, RabbitMQ/Kafka/whatever, and...

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#363

Post by EthanHeilman »

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.

Seriously? I worked at startups and research institutions. We trained people on interviews. I know Google used to invest quite a bit on interview training.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#364

Post by sdevonoes »

lccerina wrote: post #94
sdevonoes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the company you work for just push for unnecessary complexity, get out of there! Why? We learn all these cool patterns and techniques to address existing complexity. We get to fight TRexes… and so we get paid good money (compared to other jobs). No one is gonna pay me 120K in europe to build simple stuff that can work in a single sqlite db with a php fronted.

Except now we get websites that need to download 20-25MB of "latest cool framework" to show you a blurb of text because programmers before you created unnecessary complexity that needs to be maintained forever. The honest opinion no one wants to hear is that programmers do not deserve the money they are paid for because MOST of the time what it's really needed is a "single sqlite db with a php frontend".

Fair. I work on backend, and there we usually need db replication, sharding, event brokers, monitoring and alerting, autoscaling. I wish we wouldn’t need all of that, and could use a single server with sqlite… but that won’t cut it.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#365

Post by sztanko »

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…

Did you get the job?

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#367

Post by Quarrelsome »

maccard wrote: post #356
SteveNuts wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" "Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." I hate going to work and reinventing wheels all day because the company I work for thinks it's so special that every business function needs a 100% tailored solution to solved problems. I much prefer working somewhere that's able to tailor business processes to conform to existing stan…

I’ve interviewed a few hundred people. Probably approaching a thousand, if not already. An interview is a scenario, and if you aren’t willing to engage in the scenario that we all agreed to partake in, that’s a huge warning sign that you’re going to be difficult later down the line. The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.

but also maybe its a green flag in that this employee might see the wood for the trees and save the company a lot of money later down the line. In my experience, a lot of engineers can waste a lot of time dicking around re-inventing wheels and whatnot.

While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate [0].

For reference, I think both answers are fine and both perspectives (its a positive or a negative) are equally valid. Its just that I don't think we can confidently state either way.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3ETK7-ZM8

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#368

Post by aljgz »

In my team, I've been working to help everyone do a task that's necessary, but because it was too difficult, people bypassed it. Over time, I made it simpler, others are joining to make it even simpler, but in the process, I'm not doing as many "feature tasks" as I could. I joke that people are mad at me every day, but grateful every week and month.

I had to stop trying to prove myself to the company. I have already done that when y'all interviewed me. Now I do what's best for everyone, and I want the company to prove to me that it deserves people who do the right thing despite the processes not valuing it. If it does not, I have enough resources to spend some time on the projects I cared about most.

This mentality gave me peace of mind and helped many people in partner teams go faster and with higher quality.

Management still does not openly appreciate it, but it shows in how they interact with me. Like when you learn to talk to your parents as equals. It's unexpected for them, but they quickly embrace the new interaction and they love it much more than the one before.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#369

Post by inerte »

wongarsu wrote: post #127
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…

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

Maybe 10 years ago I interviewed both for Netflix and Facebook.

At Netflix, I used a state machine library to handle the project they gave me. Got rejected because I didn't show I knew raw JavaScript enough.

At Facebook, I wrote a calendar dropdown from scratch. Got rejected because I should have used a library.

Interviews sometimes is just a lottery...

Yes I know both companies should have set the expectation, but you can set the expectation for EVERYTHING, otherwise you give candidates all the answers you're expecting. There's always going to be some chaos due to the huge number of variables.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#370

Post by tumetab1 »

gmuslera wrote: post #22

Not just simplicity, we are wired towards additive solutions, not substractive ones, on a problem we try to add more elements instead of taking out existing ones. And are those additions what counts, what are seen, not the invisible, missing ones.

True.

By chance, recently in an architecture discussion document I added that one of aspects to consider is how easy is to remove (the whole thing) if it's not wanted anymore.

It was an obvious case because it was an AI capability, which can be become deprecated/useless/too-risky very fast.

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