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I had a junior/intermediate level engineer start asking me minutiae about HTTP and HTTPS... After about 5 minutes of this I literally said: "Dude, have you se

I had a junior/intermediate level engineer start asking me minutiae about HTTP and HTTPS... After about 5 minutes of this I literally said: "Dude, have you seem my resume? I literally built a petabyte scale full text search engine and wrote 1.5M lines of code to do so and a HTTP framework that parses fetches more than 2PB of HTML per month. If there's some edge case that I might miss I can Google it in 30 seconds". I no longer keep small tactical issues in my head. It's pointless. Now I try to understand the system as a whole.

mattnewton 8y ago
It could be _because_ they read your resume that they asked those questions, to see if they believe it. People heavily embellish their degree of involvement in projects all the time. Or they could just be asking gotcha trivia. It’s hard to tell.
gcb0 8y ago
I guess people who allowed hacks like adding -1 fridge to get a free tv in earlier online stores could also claim "but they have build online stores that moved thousands of sales every minute" ;)
booleandilemma 8y ago
A lot of people will write whatever makes them sound good on their resumes, so we have to ask questions about minutiae to make sure candidates aren’t lying. It sucks, but this is what happens when the job you’re interviewing for has no license or certification requirements (but pays six figures).
sk5t 8y ago
Over what period of time did you write 1.5 _million_ lines of code for this one project?
- kamaal 8y ago
  Nothing to take away from the original posters work. He indeed might have written that much code. But in most cases. Its not very difficult to write 1.5 million lines of code for any project if you are writing code of the style AbstractClassFactoryFactorySingletonDispatcherFacadeInitializer That sort of the code is basically 90% auto generated by the IDE. You write the remaining 10%. As a matter of fact I would find it a tad little hard to believe that some one wrote that much(1+ million LOC) and didn't find a way to template it or do some metaprogramming work. Patterns always emerge from that kind of pile.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    The IDE can generate "headers" for a new file, it's not gonna generate tens of thousands of new files by itself, let alone in a meaningful structure. I don't think a developer would write a million line at work in their entire lifetime. I'm not saying it's impossible to achieve. I've seen outsourcing agencies deliver 100k lines with just a few block copy/pasted many many times, but that's neither working nor maintainable software.
user5994461 8y ago
Red flag: invalid metrics exception 1.5M lines is the output of a team of hundreds of developers over years. I don't believe anyone would write a million lines during a job. 2PB a month, is 125B documents at 16kB each, or 50k documents per second. That's decent. That's where it starts to be interesting in elasticsearch or hadoop.
- burtonator 8y ago
  This is a partially valid point... let me restate. About 200K lines of code is auto-generated. A more appropriate estimation would probably be about 400k lines per year as some of this code did a big mass migration and refactoring during this time but I wrote that code as well. Just in the past. KLOC is a shitty metric anyway. I'd rather write 100 KLOC that worked vs 10000KLOC that was horrible.

mattnewton 8y ago

It could be _because_ they read your resume that they asked those questions, to see if they believe it. People heavily embellish their degree of involvement in projects all the time. Or they could just be asking gotcha trivia. It’s hard to tell.

gcb0 8y ago

I guess people who allowed hacks like adding -1 fridge to get a free tv in earlier online stores could also claim "but they have build online stores that moved thousands of sales every minute" ;)

booleandilemma 8y ago

A lot of people will write whatever makes them sound good on their resumes, so we have to ask questions about minutiae to make sure candidates aren’t lying. It sucks, but this is what happens when the job you’re interviewing for has no license or certification requirements (but pays six figures).

sk5t 8y ago

Over what period of time did you write 1.5 _million_ lines of code for this one project?

kamaal 8y ago
Nothing to take away from the original posters work. He indeed might have written that much code. But in most cases. Its not very difficult to write 1.5 million lines of code for any project if you are writing code of the style AbstractClassFactoryFactorySingletonDispatcherFacadeInitializer That sort of the code is basically 90% auto generated by the IDE. You write the remaining 10%. As a matter of fact I would find it a tad little hard to believe that some one wrote that much(1+ million LOC) and didn't find a way to template it or do some metaprogramming work. Patterns always emerge from that kind of pile.
- user5994461 8y ago
  The IDE can generate "headers" for a new file, it's not gonna generate tens of thousands of new files by itself, let alone in a meaningful structure. I don't think a developer would write a million line at work in their entire lifetime. I'm not saying it's impossible to achieve. I've seen outsourcing agencies deliver 100k lines with just a few block copy/pasted many many times, but that's neither working nor maintainable software.

user5994461 8y ago

Red flag: invalid metrics exception 1.5M lines is the output of a team of hundreds of developers over years. I don't believe anyone would write a million lines during a job. 2PB a month, is 125B documents at 16kB each, or 50k documents per second. That's decent. That's where it starts to be interesting in elasticsearch or hadoop.

burtonator 8y ago
This is a partially valid point... let me restate. About 200K lines of code is auto-generated. A more appropriate estimation would probably be about 400k lines per year as some of this code did a big mass migration and refactoring during this time but I wrote that code as well. Just in the past. KLOC is a shitty metric anyway. I'd rather write 100 KLOC that worked vs 10000KLOC that was horrible.