6 ms·

It's actually great on the hiring side — you can skip all that bullshit and because tryhards are all prepping obscure CS questions just having a conversation ab

by Spivak 3y ago

It's actually great on the hiring side — you can skip all that bullshit and because tryhards are all prepping obscure CS questions just having a conversation about technical topics has become signal again. Measure something people aren't trying to game and you get a better assessment, go figure.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
Yes, I explicitly do the opposite and have the most pragmatic exercises, questions. Another thing is an exercise for system design where hyperscaling is not required and the thing is actually quite simple. Many who have specifically prepared by leetcoding and reading "cracking the coding interview" 10 times over will naturally overengineer everything trying to fit this exercise to those book patterns dropping all common sense, all the while not having actually built anything meaningful. I think these people will mostly try to rest and vest anyway. Truly passionate people will pass since they have actually built something and will understand the exercise.
- dmurray 3y ago
  When I get a system design question I always tell the interviewer "I'd just run it on a single server with an SQLite backend, that will be plenty for the median software service and you haven't told me any numbers that suggests this needs more" and then it turns out they wanted it to run at the scale of WhatsApp.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    Usually it is expected that you ask yourself what is the expected traffic, but I usually answer with a number that technically one box could handle.
  - ascar 3y ago
    "So what scale are we talking about? A few million monthly users? So like hackernews? I would use a single server... "
    - midasuni 3y ago
      You really need two in physically different locations (ideally ASes) with some form of failover, assuming you want a reasonable guaranteed uptime
      - ascar 3y ago
        Does 99.995% [1] of hackernews sound reasonable enough to you? The reality is a lot of systems (especially simple ones) run perfectly fine on a single server with next to no downtime and all the additional redundancies we introduce also add additional points of failures and without the scale that makes these necessary you might actually end up reducing your availability. [1] https://hn.hund.io/ https://hn.hund.io/
        borkyborkbork 3y ago
        This so much this! Experience is such a wonderful thing.
        midasuni 3y ago
        HN is on a pair of servers.
        ascar 3y ago
        The second one is just a standby though and not in another region. And if I recall correctly dang mentioned at an outage that the failover to the standby is manual. But I'm not sure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041
        dekhn 3y ago
        I can't see how hackernews is 99.995% if I get at least 30-40 "Can't serve your request" error pages a year.
        kens 3y ago
        > Does 99.995% [1] of hackernews sound reasonable enough to you? How did you come up with that number? I looked at the link and just one of the outages listed on January 10 was 59 minutes. That alone makes the uptime worse than 99.99% for the entire year before it was halfway through January. (99.995% means at most 26.3 minutes of downtime per year. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...)
  - dallbee 3y ago
    For what it's worth if I ever had a candidate give me this answer on a systems design problem I'd probably immediately stop evaluating them and start selling them on the role.
Geisterde 3y ago
The highest correlation I see to success in my field is a background of PC gaming. They tend to do better on interviews in the technical regard, all the flashy certificates go out the window of you cant tell me what you would do if a computer wont post.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  absolubtely! One of the best jobs I ever worked at asked me what CPU I had in my computer at home, I talked about how i'd built my own pc and the parts that went into it and why, and they (much) later when I was settled at the role said they could see I was a good candidate from that point onward. I think its useful to show a curiosity about your tools, about the boundaries of your world, which is useful when things arent going to plan
  - sverhagen 3y ago
    Do you really think it made you a better candidate, or did this person just feel a connection due to a similarity in interests or in your approach to computing? Was it even relevant for the job?
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      > due to a similarity in interests or in your approach to computing? It's hard to say for sure - both of these things are also part of being a good candidate and working well in a team. But I do think that this experience is both because of and forms part of who I am, a certain troubleshooting & optimizing mindset and curiosity with machines. Is it strictly necessary, or will all people with this shared hobby/past be this way? I don't know. I do think its a useful or good fuzzy signal, to be best used alongside other signals. Was it relevant for the job? Not for the job description. There were times when I used related experience to solve problems or smooth things over though, such as figuring out why a QA engineer's setup was bluescreening (faulty ram), or in having familiarity with tools built into windows for performance profiling and debugging memory & storage problems with programs
    - 3y ago

by Spivak 3y ago

mewpmewp2 3y ago

Yes, I explicitly do the opposite and have the most pragmatic exercises, questions. Another thing is an exercise for system design where hyperscaling is not required and the thing is actually quite simple. Many who have specifically prepared by leetcoding and reading "cracking the coding interview" 10 times over will naturally overengineer everything trying to fit this exercise to those book patterns dropping all common sense, all the while not having actually built anything meaningful. I think these people will mostly try to rest and vest anyway. Truly passionate people will pass since they have actually built something and will understand the exercise.

dmurray 3y ago
When I get a system design question I always tell the interviewer "I'd just run it on a single server with an SQLite backend, that will be plenty for the median software service and you haven't told me any numbers that suggests this needs more" and then it turns out they wanted it to run at the scale of WhatsApp.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Usually it is expected that you ask yourself what is the expected traffic, but I usually answer with a number that technically one box could handle.
- ascar 3y ago
  "So what scale are we talking about? A few million monthly users? So like hackernews? I would use a single server... "
  - midasuni 3y ago
    You really need two in physically different locations (ideally ASes) with some form of failover, assuming you want a reasonable guaranteed uptime
    - ascar 3y ago
      Does 99.995% [1] of hackernews sound reasonable enough to you? The reality is a lot of systems (especially simple ones) run perfectly fine on a single server with next to no downtime and all the additional redundancies we introduce also add additional points of failures and without the scale that makes these necessary you might actually end up reducing your availability. [1] https://hn.hund.io/ https://hn.hund.io/
      - borkyborkbork 3y ago
        This so much this! Experience is such a wonderful thing.
      - midasuni 3y ago
        HN is on a pair of servers.
        ascar 3y ago
        The second one is just a standby though and not in another region. And if I recall correctly dang mentioned at an outage that the failover to the standby is manual. But I'm not sure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041
      - dekhn 3y ago
        I can't see how hackernews is 99.995% if I get at least 30-40 "Can't serve your request" error pages a year.
      - kens 3y ago
        > Does 99.995% [1] of hackernews sound reasonable enough to you? How did you come up with that number? I looked at the link and just one of the outages listed on January 10 was 59 minutes. That alone makes the uptime worse than 99.99% for the entire year before it was halfway through January. (99.995% means at most 26.3 minutes of downtime per year. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...)
- dallbee 3y ago
  For what it's worth if I ever had a candidate give me this answer on a systems design problem I'd probably immediately stop evaluating them and start selling them on the role.

Geisterde 3y ago

The highest correlation I see to success in my field is a background of PC gaming. They tend to do better on interviews in the technical regard, all the flashy certificates go out the window of you cant tell me what you would do if a computer wont post.

RugnirViking 3y ago
absolubtely! One of the best jobs I ever worked at asked me what CPU I had in my computer at home, I talked about how i'd built my own pc and the parts that went into it and why, and they (much) later when I was settled at the role said they could see I was a good candidate from that point onward. I think its useful to show a curiosity about your tools, about the boundaries of your world, which is useful when things arent going to plan
- sverhagen 3y ago
  Do you really think it made you a better candidate, or did this person just feel a connection due to a similarity in interests or in your approach to computing? Was it even relevant for the job?
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    > due to a similarity in interests or in your approach to computing? It's hard to say for sure - both of these things are also part of being a good candidate and working well in a team. But I do think that this experience is both because of and forms part of who I am, a certain troubleshooting & optimizing mindset and curiosity with machines. Is it strictly necessary, or will all people with this shared hobby/past be this way? I don't know. I do think its a useful or good fuzzy signal, to be best used alongside other signals. Was it relevant for the job? Not for the job description. There were times when I used related experience to solve problems or smooth things over though, such as figuring out why a QA engineer's setup was bluescreening (faulty ram), or in having familiarity with tools built into windows for performance profiling and debugging memory & storage problems with programs
  - 3y ago