Nobody gets promoted for simplicity • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#531

Post by badosu » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #267

badosu wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I didn't get it. What was the 'right' answer?

It depends on the situation. Sometimes you just have a bad interviewer who is looking for something specific from you but isn't telling you. If you're experienced in these interviews, you catch the signs and adapt by asking questions to suss out which direction the interviewer wants to take it. Sometimes your answer is plausible but the interviewer wants to see you justify it. Sometimes your answer is wrong but the i…

Thank you!

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#532

Post by SergeAx » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 4:23 AM UTC

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…

On the interview for my current job, they asked me what I would do if I needed to download the entire Wikipedia. They expected me to design a scalable system with a separate crawler, parser, download queue, exponential backoff, and stuff. I said that I would just download a tarball. To their credit, they quickly accepted the answer as correct.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#533

Post by Niko901ch » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

mattcollins wrote: post #45

Niko901ch wrote: post #21

AI coding tools are making this problem worse in a subtle way. When an agent can generate a "scalable event-driven architecture" in 5 minutes, the build cost of complexity drops to near zero. But the maintenance cost doesn't. So now you get Engineer B's output even faster, with even more impressive-sounding abstractions, and the promotion packet writes itself in minutes too. Meanwhile the actual cost - debugging, onb…

On the other hand, AI coding tools make it relatively easy to set and apply policies that can help with this sort of thing. I like to have something like the following in AGENTS.md: ## Guiding Principles - Optimise for long-term maintainability - KISS - YAGNI

This is exactly right. I maintain an AGENTS.md for my own AI assistant with similar principles - "禁止只记录不行动" (no recording without action) and strict rules about when to escalate vs. when to solve autonomously.

The key insight is that the AGENTS.md becomes a kind of "engineering culture in a file". When you onboard a human engineer, you hope they absorb the team's values over time. With AI, you can encode those values upfront.

The challenge is that principles need to be specific enough to be actionable. "Write simple code" is too vague. "Avoid single-use wrapper functions" (from the sibling comment) is better - it's enforceable.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#534

Post by robertlagrant » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 12:24 PM UTC

gorbachev wrote: post #145

robertlagrant wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar idea once when answering a Stack Overflow question[0]. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1831841/61938

Quoting your comment: "You definitely don't want to hire the person who thinks - bizarrely - that using library functions is a sign of weakness." So true...I've failed interviews, because the interviewee did see using library functions as a sign of weakness.

Thank you, although I regret the "bizarrely".