Nobody gets promoted for simplicity • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#381

Post by swiftcoder » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #117

swiftcoder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least from the point of view of the interviewer, this was the point where they should give you a polite "hey, play along" nudge. That may be the game, but we all know it's bullshit, and we shouldn't be playing along. If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance cost…

> If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance costs of software All interviews are contrived / artificial situations: The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes. Furthermore, we're getting Bilsbie's (op) take on the situation, there may be context that…

> The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes

The problem is that this is a 2-way street. The candidate is forced to guess the interviewer's thought process, because otherwise they may be pitching over the interviewers head.

We have to spend a ton of time calibrating hiring loops for this, because otherwise you get staff level candidates being failed by mid-career interviewers who don't understand the full context of the question they are asking (and hence don't understand why a staff eng solves it differently than they would).

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#382

Post by elictronic » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

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.

Quite a bit based on the number of interviews performed at software companies. Being on either side of the fence gives you experience.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#383

Post by t43562 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

Simplicity can be a powerful defence against complexity. When there are many ways something can go wrong.

Rather than trying to anticipate all the different failure modes one tries at first just to handle fact of failure itself, assuming there's no remediation.

If there's a way to make sure the worst case isn't terrible in some simple way then you do that first - like making a backup file or tr4ying to keep APIs idempotent so you can recover from issues and so on.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#384

Post by bluGill » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

horsawlarway wrote: post #218

bluGill wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it needs a real engineer (and often more money than they can spend) to create the right solution. Then it's the wrong solution. Period. There are plenty of annoyances with spreadsheets, but part of what makes them so robust and powerful is that they don't take a ton of specialized knowledge, and they remain incredibly flexible. An expensive, complicated, static, "right" solution for a small business is folly (hones…

You are missing something: how much is spent because the spreadsheet isn't the right solution - nobody measures this (or even knows how). How much are you risking because spreadsheets are not robust - when will a mistake catch up, and what will be the cost? There is a reason accountants use double entry bookkeeping, and spreadsheets don't have that.

Nobody has the money to spend doing things right unless they have been burned. That doesn't mean the money shouldn't be spent first.

Spreadsheets are powerful I will grant. However they are not robust. A robust system works very different and includes features (like tests) that your spreadsheet doesn't have (I don't if it could have them, but it is safe to guess they don't)

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#385

Post by voxl » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

JDye wrote: post #272

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 ar…

If your interview questions answer is a particular technology then you're asking a really bad question.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#386

Post by AntiDyatlov » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

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.

I think the contrived scenarios you come up with need to not have a trivial solution. Everything about my brain is optimized for KISS, it breaks everything to turn down simple solutions to reach for something more complex.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#387

Post by Vegenoid » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

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…

As a teenager I worked at a company that rented rafts for a short trip down a river. We’d take the rafts from the customers at the end and truck them back up to the start. As they became bigger and busier, it became more important to keep track of the status of rafts and know when they were going to be getting back to the top.

They paid tens of thousands to have software made for this purpose. It sucked and was totally unable to handle the simultaneous realtime access and modification that was required.

They knew I was good with computers, so asked me if I had any ideas. In about an hour I made them a Google Sheet that worked great for the next several years until I left.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#388

Post by 9rx » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #343

jb3689 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

"That does sound like something nice to have. However, recreating Google Sheets is a substantial undertaking. First, we need to evaluate the business case for duplicating something that already exists to ensure that there is a net benefit in doing so. Second, we need to determine if the business has sufficient capital to see the project through."

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#389

Post by aarestad » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

The example he gave where each dev gets a single feature done seems to skip over the opportunity that Dev A has - after she spends only "a couple days" on that feature to ship a simple solution, she now has the rest of that week to do another feature, and another... in fact, she could probably get 6 features done in the time that Mr. Complexity took to do his one feature (3 weeks in the straw-man example). Then the promo packet looks much better for Dev A - while it says "implemented feature X", it also says "implemented feature A, feature B, feature C...". Doesn't that seem more attractive?

Slightly related: I've noticed that there are lots of "ideas guys" (yes, guys) in our field who love to bloviate, and maybe even accomplish some stuff that looks really good. I have made a career out of just putting my head down and getting shit done. I may not have grand design ideas, and in fact have had to unlearn the "fact" that you need to come up with, and implement, Big Ideas. In my experience, people who "get shit done" may not get fancy awards, but their work is recognized and rewarded.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#390

Post by taeric » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #130

tylerrooney wrote: post #92

I worked at Amazon 2005-2008 as a Software Dev Engineer. To hammer home company culture, there were two awards which could be awarded at the Quarterly All-hands meeting * The "Just Do It" Award which recognized someone just fixing some obvious problem at was in front of them but not responsibility * The "Door Desk" Award for frugality, named in honour of the basic door-frame-four-leg desk everyone worked on. In many…

Except that of course, the "simple" Door Desk was actually more expensive than the equivalent from Ikea, had no real additional functionality and took more time to put together. Which somewhat muddies the metaphor ... (amzn 94-96)

I confess I assumed that the spirit of that award was more in "using what you have" than it was in making a simpler solution? They definitely over indexed on how clever the door desks were, though.

It is funny how much people assume quality from appearances, though. Same for costs.