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> Never in my entire career have I whiteboarded a solution that even remotely survived contact with software frameworks, APIs and hardware constraints. A hundre

> Never in my entire career have I whiteboarded a solution that even remotely survived contact with software frameworks, APIs and hardware constraints. A hundred different gotchas and restrictions lay in wait. Not sure about this. Past a certain level of experience (and given some prior knowledge of the system being worked on) I’d expect someone’s white boarded designs to come out close to the mark at least some of the time. Not always, maybe not even half the time, but “never in my entire career” would surprise me.

pas 4y ago
Hm, his GitHub profile starts in 2017, before that according to his LinkedIn profile he was a project manager, and since then works as a DevOps guy. Though he was already writing SQL migrations in 2008 (from MySQL to SQL Server 2005). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's not terribly surprising to me that he simply doesn't have experience with coming up with architectures on the spot. Doing interviews is hard, from both sides. No candidate wants to seem arrogant by explaining that why the question/task/problem is bad in the context[0], so the frustration remains and gets vented in blog posts. [0] Because roles (job descriptions) in the tech industry is so vague, and goes through so many hands. (HR, recruiter, engineering managers, job portals, etc...) And by the time the interview happens it's no wonder the parties have a lot of mismatched expectations of each other. And that's just the baseline, what the post describes is just plain old fucking shitty behavior in a shit job market.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  > It's not terribly surprising to me that he simply doesn't have experience with coming up with architectures on the spot. Or, maybe they spent their career mostly building applications and not architecting systems. Those are very distinct skills. Of course, it also doesn't help that in an interview context, "system design" can mean "design infrastructure to support a system," or "object-oriented design of a system."
viraptor 4y ago
Not only that, whiteboarding a design will bring up lots of the issues you'd otherwise find in those small steps anyway. It just shifts them left - boasting about purposefully delaying finding them is not great.
kamaal 4y ago
Sorry but your parent post is right. It's not realistic to day dream yourself to a real product. I realised this from the waterfall model days itself, where elaborate documents used to be written before we even wrote a single line of code. And every single time the paper planning would be totally useless and nothing like what the original deliverable would turn out to be.
- bdavis__ 4y ago
  "totally useless". maybe just "useless". my experience is you learned a lot about the problem domain and the system constraints during the creation of those documents. you didn't learn enough to solve the problem, but it got you started.

pas 4y ago

Hm, his GitHub profile starts in 2017, before that according to his LinkedIn profile he was a project manager, and since then works as a DevOps guy. Though he was already writing SQL migrations in 2008 (from MySQL to SQL Server 2005). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's not terribly surprising to me that he simply doesn't have experience with coming up with architectures on the spot. Doing interviews is hard, from both sides. No candidate wants to seem arrogant by explaining that why the question/task/problem is bad in the context[0], so the frustration remains and gets vented in blog posts. [0] Because roles (job descriptions) in the tech industry is so vague, and goes through so many hands. (HR, recruiter, engineering managers, job portals, etc...) And by the time the interview happens it's no wonder the parties have a lot of mismatched expectations of each other. And that's just the baseline, what the post describes is just plain old fucking shitty behavior in a shit job market.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
> It's not terribly surprising to me that he simply doesn't have experience with coming up with architectures on the spot. Or, maybe they spent their career mostly building applications and not architecting systems. Those are very distinct skills. Of course, it also doesn't help that in an interview context, "system design" can mean "design infrastructure to support a system," or "object-oriented design of a system."

viraptor 4y ago

Not only that, whiteboarding a design will bring up lots of the issues you'd otherwise find in those small steps anyway. It just shifts them left - boasting about purposefully delaying finding them is not great.

kamaal 4y ago

Sorry but your parent post is right. It's not realistic to day dream yourself to a real product. I realised this from the waterfall model days itself, where elaborate documents used to be written before we even wrote a single line of code. And every single time the paper planning would be totally useless and nothing like what the original deliverable would turn out to be.

bdavis__ 4y ago
"totally useless". maybe just "useless". my experience is you learned a lot about the problem domain and the system constraints during the creation of those documents. you didn't learn enough to solve the problem, but it got you started.