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Honestly, the bigger issue is that most SWEs just aren’t very good. It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system des

Honestly, the bigger issue is that most SWEs just aren’t very good. It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles… System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING. That’s the part that is responsible for creating a foundation of quality to build on. The other side is that sysadmins have largely become DevOps or SRE roles, which means most folks left as a sysadmin are those that couldn’t hack it in the other roles. In the end, as we grow the number of people in tech, the number of software and systems, and the complexity we experience a regression to the mean across the board. It’s always been a pet peeve of mine that I can count on my hand the number of SWEs in my ~20yr career that had similar understanding of the system they worked with as their SRE counterparts… but this should be table stakes.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago
> It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles… Yes. It's absurd that anyone that can talk about this stuff at a basic level is seen as some sort of ultra-skilled professional. See also: the relatively small amount of chatter about this stuff in the blogosphere, where there's a million tutorials that amount to "here's how you run create-react-app" and about 3 that talk about even moderate system design topics.
vsareto 5y ago
I think most devs see that the jobs are asking for overloaded responsibilities from multiple other jobs and they're trying to live up to that. It also became the norm to see job postings which would have been 3-4 distinct positions a decade back.
rr808 5y ago
> Honestly, the bigger issue is that most SWEs just aren’t very good. It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles… I think this is a bit unfair, the software industry is so big now there are lots of different sub-sectors. Big Tech companies have huge scale problems that are kind of unique. Most developers work on products that only have a few hundred users at a time. Your 20 years experience is a bit telling. I'm the same age, back then SWEs usually had full access to production environments. Now everything is segregated and devs can't experiment in prod and end up getting detached.
loeg 5y ago
> It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles… > System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING. I mean, I would say I'm pretty good at engineering and system design (10 YoE, senior/principal for most of them). But I dread the system design interview questions because (in my experience) they bear almost no relation to the system design experience I have and almost no relation to the actual requirements of the job. Things like "design an ETL flow" or "build a distributed wikipedia downloader" are just not in my area of experience. (I work mostly in the lower layers of single-host operating systems and file systems.)
- AndyNemmity 5y ago
  In the real world, if I was tasked with "build a distrbuted wikipedia downloader" I wouldn't just start randomly guessing. I'd get input, feedback, discuss, narrow down options. Yet for some reason, that's an actual interview question. Start randomly guessing based on your knowledge of something, in a way that you'd never do in a real scenario. Edit: I feel like I should do an interview like this. Refuse to explain how to build it, and instead explain the detailed process on how I would successfully build and complete the project. lol
  - mwmisner 5y ago
    I totally agree that system design questions can be silly sometimes. When I do system design interview questions for senior engineers, I ask a really broad and complex questions and let the candidate drive us towards the system. The point of the interview is evaluating if the candidate can complete those soft skills in a reasonable way. I try to answer basic questions such as these: Did the candidate just go for design without asking questions? What questions does the candidate ask? What areas are they asking questions about? Can they take critical feedback on their design well? There is a little bit of discussion on technology choice, but typically if they can justify an out of the norm choice it is fine.
    - AndyNemmity 5y ago
rhines 5y ago
Maybe we're just in different circles, or perhaps have different definitions of system design, but that's not been my experience. Usually I see developers being very excited about system design and quite good at understanding system design questions - nothing's more fun than architecting a new system and thinking about stuff like scalability. Where people tend to fail is when they have to implement these systems, and they've planned for all these high level building blocks but then actually have to configure them. Redis, RabbitMQ, GraphQL, Docker, NGINX, the list goes on - there's so much to configure and you really don't truly know how they work unless you dive into the source code, so you inevitably get bitten by subtle bugs and errors where your expectations of how something should work based on the docs are violated by how it actually works. Should a SWE have a deep level understanding of all this stuff? I'm not sure. Usually you can still hack it into a working system after a little bit of firefighting, and that's likely more time efficient than understanding source code or rolling your own infrastructure. But I definitely think there's room for more comprehensive and transparent documentation to bridge the gap between the source code and barebones docs.
- rainsil 5y ago
  >But I definitely think there's room for more comprehensive and transparent documentation to bridge the gap between the source code and barebones docs. This is usually provided by technical books, which are available for a much wider range of systems than you'd think.
- kcb 5y ago
  Agree completely. I've never known a software engineer who didn't love designing new systems on paper and starting the initial development. It's when it comes time to stabilize and turn a system into a usable product minds quickly wander to designing the next system that fixes the flaws of the last system.
throwaway889900 5y ago
>System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING. I thought system design was the point of system engineering?
- tristor 5y ago
  Software is a system.
vaylian 5y ago
SRE = Site reliability engineer? SWE = Software Engineer (obviously)
Supermancho 5y ago
> System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING Software Engineering is about problem solving using software and hardware (we'll just say computers for simplicity). Whatever solution system you propose has inherent constraints and tradeoffs. That's the Engineering. System design is a catchall phrase for a subjective problem scale.
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icedchai 5y ago
True, but even in the 90's and early 2000's, before cloud took off, most developers weren't sysadmins, and they didn't want to be. That wasn't their specialty. The "Unix wizard" developer was always a rare breed.
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sethrin 5y ago
Speaking personally, the reason I dread system design questions is because it's asking me to give an off-the-cuff answer to something I would prefer to take weeks to consider and research.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

> It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles… Yes. It's absurd that anyone that can talk about this stuff at a basic level is seen as some sort of ultra-skilled professional. See also: the relatively small amount of chatter about this stuff in the blogosphere, where there's a million tutorials that amount to "here's how you run create-react-app" and about 3 that talk about even moderate system design topics.

vsareto 5y ago

I think most devs see that the jobs are asking for overloaded responsibilities from multiple other jobs and they're trying to live up to that. It also became the norm to see job postings which would have been 3-4 distinct positions a decade back.

rr808 5y ago

> Honestly, the bigger issue is that most SWEs just aren’t very good. It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles… I think this is a bit unfair, the software industry is so big now there are lots of different sub-sectors. Big Tech companies have huge scale problems that are kind of unique. Most developers work on products that only have a few hundred users at a time. Your 20 years experience is a bit telling. I'm the same age, back then SWEs usually had full access to production environments. Now everything is segregated and devs can't experiment in prod and end up getting detached.

loeg 5y ago

> It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles… > System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING. I mean, I would say I'm pretty good at engineering and system design (10 YoE, senior/principal for most of them). But I dread the system design interview questions because (in my experience) they bear almost no relation to the system design experience I have and almost no relation to the actual requirements of the job. Things like "design an ETL flow" or "build a distributed wikipedia downloader" are just not in my area of experience. (I work mostly in the lower layers of single-host operating systems and file systems.)

AndyNemmity 5y ago
In the real world, if I was tasked with "build a distrbuted wikipedia downloader" I wouldn't just start randomly guessing. I'd get input, feedback, discuss, narrow down options. Yet for some reason, that's an actual interview question. Start randomly guessing based on your knowledge of something, in a way that you'd never do in a real scenario. Edit: I feel like I should do an interview like this. Refuse to explain how to build it, and instead explain the detailed process on how I would successfully build and complete the project. lol
- mwmisner 5y ago
  I totally agree that system design questions can be silly sometimes. When I do system design interview questions for senior engineers, I ask a really broad and complex questions and let the candidate drive us towards the system. The point of the interview is evaluating if the candidate can complete those soft skills in a reasonable way. I try to answer basic questions such as these: Did the candidate just go for design without asking questions? What questions does the candidate ask? What areas are they asking questions about? Can they take critical feedback on their design well? There is a little bit of discussion on technology choice, but typically if they can justify an out of the norm choice it is fine.
  - AndyNemmity 5y ago

rhines 5y ago

Maybe we're just in different circles, or perhaps have different definitions of system design, but that's not been my experience. Usually I see developers being very excited about system design and quite good at understanding system design questions - nothing's more fun than architecting a new system and thinking about stuff like scalability. Where people tend to fail is when they have to implement these systems, and they've planned for all these high level building blocks but then actually have to configure them. Redis, RabbitMQ, GraphQL, Docker, NGINX, the list goes on - there's so much to configure and you really don't truly know how they work unless you dive into the source code, so you inevitably get bitten by subtle bugs and errors where your expectations of how something should work based on the docs are violated by how it actually works. Should a SWE have a deep level understanding of all this stuff? I'm not sure. Usually you can still hack it into a working system after a little bit of firefighting, and that's likely more time efficient than understanding source code or rolling your own infrastructure. But I definitely think there's room for more comprehensive and transparent documentation to bridge the gap between the source code and barebones docs.

rainsil 5y ago
>But I definitely think there's room for more comprehensive and transparent documentation to bridge the gap between the source code and barebones docs. This is usually provided by technical books, which are available for a much wider range of systems than you'd think.
kcb 5y ago
Agree completely. I've never known a software engineer who didn't love designing new systems on paper and starting the initial development. It's when it comes time to stabilize and turn a system into a usable product minds quickly wander to designing the next system that fixes the flaws of the last system.

throwaway889900 5y ago

>System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING. I thought system design was the point of system engineering?

tristor 5y ago
Software is a system.

vaylian 5y ago

SRE = Site reliability engineer? SWE = Software Engineer (obviously)

Supermancho 5y ago

> System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING Software Engineering is about problem solving using software and hardware (we'll just say computers for simplicity). Whatever solution system you propose has inherent constraints and tradeoffs. That's the Engineering. System design is a catchall phrase for a subjective problem scale.

deleted 5y ago

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icedchai 5y ago

True, but even in the 90's and early 2000's, before cloud took off, most developers weren't sysadmins, and they didn't want to be. That wasn't their specialty. The "Unix wizard" developer was always a rare breed.

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sethrin 5y ago

Speaking personally, the reason I dread system design questions is because it's asking me to give an off-the-cuff answer to something I would prefer to take weeks to consider and research.