421–430 of 534 posts
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…
I got emotional reading this. This is way too real.
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.…
If I would be the interviewer in this kind of situation, I would just follow up with something like this: "that might be a good option, but let's assume you need to build a tool to replace those excel sheets, ..."
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…
Sure they do. You just need to spell it out in business terms, not tech terms: "Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%" Simplicity for its own sake is not valued. The results of simplicity are highly valued.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complete agreement. "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?"
> "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…
It's not your problem they're hellbent on building a new wheel. They're willing to pay you!
Chances are, you've thought of your own pain points in whatever they've asked you to build and you've now got an opportunity to shine by solving them and demonstrate your expertise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best way to get promoted at stripe is just self-marketing and social manipulation. Good engineers are leaving meanwhile tecnical leadership is being replaced with designers and marketers. Internal performance metrics are heavily manipulated as well. Patrick has completely surrounded himself with extreme sycophants at this point - he has no idea what is actually going on in his company beyond curated metrics produ…
Patrick Collison sounds like a lovely, trusting, scientifically-minded man who needs to learn the constructive power of destruction. The power of rage and contempt for bad solutions and bad communication (regardless of intent). With a smiley face front-end, of course. Wouldn't want to seem not-nice!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Funny times we're in right now.
Ironically, this article is "over simplifying" the problem. 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, o…