431–440 of 534 posts
I'd add one point to this, as someone who voraciously fights against complexity at every turn, more and more as I get older. I've experienced times where leadership/management will assume that you're fighting against the complex solution simply because you don't grasp or understand it. It's irritating at best. The longest lived projects and solutions I've worked on have always been the simplest, easiest to replace so…
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…
Think of it this way: they're paying you lots of money to build something boring that has a lot of prior art/research available to you for free. This could be the easiest money maker in your life. 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 shi…
Some even say, this tool will replace a lot of workers soon(sic!).
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 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To give you the inverse perspective, an OG blogger named Steve Yegge made a list of five essential phone screen questions: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho... Question three is this: Last year my team had to remove all the phone numbers from 50,000 Amazon web page templates, since many of the numbers were no longer in service, and we also wanted to route all customer contacts through a sin…
At AWS, a team asked for help maintaining a bespoke internal Java service that diff'd json for manual reviews.. replaced it with a jq one-liner
I told him to slurp it all into a sqlite database and to express his data integrity questions as SQL queries.
It was still a pain in the ass for him, but leveraging that tool made things go a lot better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mistak…
I think you missed the point in GP's post. Not all organizations optimize for problem solving. Some organizations prefer subordinates who follow orders (or better, is able to read the mind of the boss to decipher what order he is actually making) than those who breaks out of the box and says ”just use gsuite, boss."
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mistak…
if you answer ""Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." You probably are missing the wood and the trees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is really a big interviewer training failure. Vast majority of interviews are pretty bad. I can only remember one or two interviews that did not colossally suck in some way.
It takes a lot of practice to become good interviewer and majority of ICs especially at small shops never get the required mileage. I don't think i really knew what i was doing until like 100 sessions in...
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 p…
Not if management is moving at the speed of the more complex solution.
> yes, guys
I thought that blatant sexism wasn't a part of this website.
> In my experience, people who "get shit done" may not get fancy awards, but their work is recognized and rewarded.
top kek