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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#471

Post by maccard »

mv4 wrote: post #464
maccard wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also feel it's very easy for a good interviewer to bring the conversation back to the desired scenario. Anything from "imagine we are in a parallel universe where Google Sheets has not been invented yet" to "how would you design a google sheets competitor" would do the trick. Source: interviewed hundreds, incl FAANG.

Yeah - for sure. When I’m interviewing I want to give the candidate the best chance of success and to show off both what they know and how they will work with me.

I generally give it three goes with questions like these - the initial ask, and two clarifications. If we’re not getting anywhere I move on.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#472

Post by ahel »

alansaber wrote: post #431
tracker1 wrote: post #268

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…

The only way to learn this lesson is the hard way

here is your scapegoat. no lesson learnt. another round please.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#473

Post by maccard »

wpietri wrote: post #444
maccard wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure. I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not…

> when the moment calls for it

In an interview when you’ve been explicitly asked to discuss a topic to have a technical discussion about something is not when the moment calls for it. Doubly so if you’ve been asked twice. If you’re not willing to put aside being technically correct when you’re trying to show off your best self, it’s pretty likely that when things get tough, you’ll behave the same.

> unless of course what you’re being for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power

D, do you think that someone saying “can we please talk about a technical topic, here’s an example we’re both likely familiar with” is looking for yes men? I actively want my team and coworkers to challenge me, but I absolutely don’t want to work with that person who appears at every meeting with a list of reasons why we shouldn’t do X.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#474

Post by wpietri »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #470
wpietri wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure. I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not…

> I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. <3. What do you think makes the difference here in orgs that respect this and those that simply try to hire yesmen?

Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success.

I think all of those tendencies come to the fore at any organization that doesn't have either a strong sense of mission or a sufficiently desperate need for success that they pay attention to material reality rather than social reality. With a possible partial exception for things like co-ops and other places where the culture is fundamentally different enough. E.g., Mondragon, or Zingerman's.

I think Google, back in its don't be evil/organize the world's information era, probably qualified. They started with a very strong mission-driven culture rooted in academics and engineering. It took a fair bit of time for MBA dogmas to make it like most other places. But from everything I hear, what once felt almost like a calling now is just another job.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#475

Post by wpietri »

wpietri wrote: post #446
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…

> yes you might be right but you also understand what the point of the interview is To make the interviewer feel smart and powerful? To hire people who will do the thing the boss wants whether or not it makes sense? To find people who will overdesign things to maximize resume impact and the ability of their bosses to talk about what sophisticated systems they're running and for which they therefore need a much bigger…

Just to be clear, I'm absolutely not kidding here. E.g., this is the kind of hiring process I favor: https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-h...

To rethink hiring, you have to spend some time understanding why most hiring is terrible both in terms of candidate experience and actual result. In my view so much of both hiring and general business operations is about managerial status and ego. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#476

Post by Quarrelsome »

wpietri wrote: post #474
Quarrelsome wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. <3. What do you think makes the difference here in orgs that respect this and those that simply try to hire yesmen?

Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success. I think all of those tend…

> MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success.

This is a common refrain I also believe in and there's an interesting open question that comes up here about whether or not an engineering department should or shouldn't execute an order that intentionally destroys the product for short term gain.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#477

Post by PKop »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #171
PKop wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it's a good answer and shows good instincts, but they still want to know how he would design a system if one was necessary. There's no need to be ridiculous about any of this from either perspective, which is why it should never have been a "fail" without the original interviewer simply saying "That's a solid answer now tell me what you would do if you had to build something new". I mean look how much time he was…

If the numbers can be satisfied by a Postgres then thats the correct answer. The interviewers fucked up, because they sized the problem wrongly. This is the same issue that was prevalent when the industry switched from HDD to SSD: some system design questions suddenly became trivial, because the IOPS went up by magnitudes. This is not a failure of the interviewees, who correctly went with the times, but a failure of…

> then that's the correct answer.

Obviously. But they don't care about that answer, they care about the design of a new system so I'm saying the interviewer is dumb for not just asking directly for the solution he wants to see (while also giving credit for the original right answer).

The interviewee is dumb (if he wants the job) to not know this is what they want to hear, so he can just say "I really do think Postgres would satisfy the requirements here, but as an alternative a custom solution would look like.."

What is the point of not demonstrating your own well rounded knowledge when given the opportunity? Is it not obvious what they want to hear? Then why not tell them, again given that he did want the job

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#478

Post by wpietri »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #476
wpietri wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success. I think all of those tend…

> MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success. This is a common refrain I also believe in and there's an interesting open question that comes up here about whether or not an engineering department should or shouldn't execute an order that intentionally destroys the product for short term gain.

Agreed. To me that's related to the question of minions vs professionals.

If I go to a doctor and say, "Hey, please prescribe me a lot of morphine," the answer will be some version of "hell no". That's because doctors, even if you pay for the visit, have responsibilities to the patient, the profession, and society at large. Responsibilities that should not be overridden by money or power.

The same is true for actual engineers, like the ones that build bridges. But although we often call ourselves engineers, a lot of us don't act like it. We're often more like the minions in a supervillain's volcano lair: whatever the boss says, we do.

We could be different, though. There's the ACM code of ethics, for example: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

Or the IEEE-CS code of ethics specifically for software: https://www.computer.org/education/code-of-ethics

We could, as a profession, agree to follow those. We could build an organization that supports people who do the right thing in the face of managerial pressure. We could censure those who don't. I'd love to see it happen, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#479

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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.

In my case? Two days I think (it was long ago). Two very eye-opening days.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#480

Post by wpietri »

maccard wrote: post #473
wpietri wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure. I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not…

> when the moment calls for it In an interview when you’ve been explicitly asked to discuss a topic to have a technical discussion about something is not when the moment calls for it. Doubly so if you’ve been asked twice. If you’re not willing to put aside being technically correct when you’re trying to show off your best self, it’s pretty likely that when things get tough, you’ll behave the same. > unless of course…

When I ask an interviewee a technical question, what I want is an answer that is correct technically.

If I want them to give me a different kind of technical answer, then I think it's on me to ask a question that actually requires what I'm looking for. It's not hard! All the Stripe interviewer had to say is, "Ok, great. It sounds like you have a good sense for system capacity. Now let's add another zero to all the load numbers." And then keep increasing orders of magnitude until they learn what they're looking to learn.

I am, just to be clear, not defending people being willfully obtuse or contrary jackasses. But that's not the scenario being described in either the Stripe story or the Google Sheets story I'm responding to. Two apparently reasonable people were asked technical questions and they gave answers that were the right thing for the business.

I think that's good and I like to hire people like that. I get lots of others don't, and I get the POSIWID reasons behind it. But I'm not going to pretend I think it's a healthy way to run an organization. And I also get that the people who like pretense and deference in interviews are not going to like me saying so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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