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No offense intended, but I wouldn't have liked that answer either, especially as it isn't an answer to the question posed. It might well have been a hypothetic
by bmelton 15y ago
No offense intended, but I wouldn't have liked that answer either, especially as it isn't an answer to the question posed.
It might well have been a hypothetical problem they've had in the past or that they've heard of, or it might have even been that their application requirements evolved into the use case above.
Not answering the question doesn't indicate that you can solve the problem. Right or wrong, businesses arrive at scenarios like this often due to circumstances outside their control.
Either way, I like it as an interview question, as it would effectively filter out people who are either not clever enough to solve it or not motivated enough.
When I hire, one of the best things I can hope to find in an potential employee is a 'can-do' attitude. While that might sound cliche, you can hire pretty much any smart person to point out the problems you have. It's much more difficult to hire somebody who can both identify those problems and come up with potential solutions and is capable of fixing them.
- lowglow 15y agoI'd rather someone tell me that the problem is flawed and offer me another alternative to avoid future problems -- that would be experience talking. I'd rather have someone FIX problems and not just patch a system continuously hobbling down the wrong path. I'd like not be too far down the rabbit hole and figure out we need a major architecture overhaul. More research and planning from the start, saves time and money in the end.
- caw 15y agoAgreed. But this isn't even a solution you can't implement for legacy reasons. At any point you can do this, and you can probably do it live by taking it out of the load balancer equation one at a time. In this case, centralizing storage makes sense. Pros: less stuff to manage, no more rsyncs, immediate feedback on all servers. Save money by only needing to buy 1/n amount of space (assuming the space required is significant) because you're only maintaining X GB centrally versus X GB * n servers. Cons: Money up front, increased latency to fetch data, but you're already waiting up to 5 minutes.