5 ms·

From the point of view of the interviewee, it's impossible to guess if they expect you to answer "no need for big data" or if they expect you to answer "the com

• kmarc 2y ago
  FWIW, it's a 2.5 second extra to say "Although you don't need big data, but if you insist, ..." and gimme the hadoop answer.
  • whamlastxmas 2y ago
    Is this like interviewing for a chef position for a fancy restaurant and when asked how to perfectly cook a steak, you preface it with “well you can either go to McDonald’s and get a burger, or…” It may not be reasonable to suggest that in a role that traditionally uses big data tools
    • dkz999 2y ago
      Idk, in this instance I feel pretty strongly that cloud, and solutions with unecessary overhead, are the fast food. The article proposes not eating it all the time.
    • hnfong 2y ago
      I see it more like "it's 11pm and a family member suddenly wants to eat a steak at home, what would you do?" The person who says "I'm going drive back to the restaurant and take my professional equipment home to cook the steak" is probably offering the wrong answer. I'm obviously not a professional cook, but presumably the ability to improvise with whatever tools you currently have is a desirable skill.
      • palata 2y ago
        Hmm I would say that the equivalent to your 11pm question is more something like "your sister wants to backup her holiday pictures on the cloud, how do you design it?". The person who says "I ask her 10 millions to build a data center" is probably offering the wrong answer :-).
    • tored 2y ago
      I think more like, how would you prepare and cook the best five course gala dinner for only $10. That requires true skill.
    • bee_rider 2y ago
      I’m not sure if you are referencing it intentionally or not, but some chefs (Gordon Ramsey for one) will ask an interviewee to make some scrambled eggs; something not super niche or specialized but enough to see what their technique is. It is a sort of “interview hack” example that’s been used to emphasize the idea of a simple unspecialized skill-test that went around a while ago. I guess upcoming chefs probably practice egg scrambling nowadays, ruining the value of the test. But maybe they could ask to make a bit of steak now.
      • jmalicki 2y ago
        This is sort of the chef equivalent of fizzbuzz or "reverse a binary tree" - there's no gimmicks, something "everyone" should know how to do, it's nothing fancy, just the basics of "can you iterate over data structures and write for loops competently" - or in this case "can you not under/over cook the eggs and can you deliver them in the style you say you're going to.
      • throwaway2037 2y ago
        The egg omelet is a classic for testing French chefs. It is much less about the ingredients (quality, etc), and much more about pure skill to cook it perfectly. What would be the equivalent for a technical interview? Perhaps: Implement a generic linked list or dynamic array.
    • Dylan16807 2y ago
      The fancy cluster is probably slower for most tasks than one big machine storing everything in RAM. It's not like a fast food burger.
  • jancsika 2y ago
    That's great, but it's really just desiderata about you and your personal situation. E.g., if a HN'er takes this as advice they're just as likely to be gated by some other interviewer who interprets hedging as a smell. I believe the posters above are essentially saying: you, the interviewer, can take the 2.5 seconds to ask the follow up, "... and if we're not immediately optimizing for scalability?" Then take that data into account when doing your assessment instead of attempting to optimize based on a single gate. Edit: clarification
    • coffeebeqn 2y ago
      This is the crux of it. Another interviewer would’ve marked “run on a local machine with a big SSD” - as: this fool doesn’t know enough about distributed systems and just runs toy projects on one machine
      • dartos 2y ago
        That is what I think interviewers think when I don’t immediately bring up kubernetes and sqs in an architecture interview
        • theamk 2y ago
          depending on the shop? For some kinds of tasks, jumping to kubernets right away would be a minus during interview.
          • altdataseller 2y ago
            Recommending kubernetes immediately is an insta-rejection for me, if I was an interviewer
        • llm_trw 2y ago
          The interview goes both ways. The few times I've ignored red flags from a company in an interview I've been in a world of pain afterwards.
      • 2y ago
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    I once killed the deployment of a big data team in a large bank when I laid out in excruciating details exactly what they'd have to deal with during an interview. Last I heard theyd promoted one unix guy on the inside to baby sit a bunch of chron jobs on the biggest server they could find.
  • palata 2y ago
    Sure, but as you said yourself: it's a trick question. How often does the employee have to answer trick questions without having any time to think in the actual job? As an interviewer, why not asking: "how would you do that in a setup that doesn't have much data and doesn't need to scale, and then how would you do it if it had a ton of data and a big need to scale?". There is no trick here, do you feel you lose information about the interviewee?
    • zdragnar 2y ago
      Depends on the level you're hiring for. At a certain point, the candidate needs to be able to identify the right tool for the job, including when that tool is not the usual big data tools but a simple script.
    • hirsin 2y ago
      Trick questions (although not known as such at the time) are the basis of most of the work we do? XY problem is a thing for a reason, and I cannot count the number of times my teams and I have ratholed on something complex only to realize we were solving for the wrong problem, i.e. A trick question. As a sibling puts it though, it's a matter of level. Senior/staff and above? Yeah, that's mostly what you do. Lower than that, then you should be able to mostly trust those upper folks to have seen through the trick.
      • palata 2y ago
        > are the basis of most of the work we do? I don't know about you, but in my work, I always have more than 3 seconds to find a solution. I can slowly think about the problem, sleep on it, read about it, try stuff, think about it while running, etc. I usually do at least some of those for new problems. Then of course there is a bunch of stuff that is not challenging and for which I can start coding right away. In an interview, those trick questions will just show you who already has experience with the problem you mentioned and who doesn't. It doesn't say at all (IMO) how good the interviewee is at tackling challenging problem. The question then is: do you want to hire someone who is good at solving challenging problems, or someone who already knows how to solve the one problem you are hiring them for?
• valenterry 2y ago
  It doesn't matter. The answer should be "It depends, what are the circumstances - do we expect high growth in the future? Is it gonna stay around 6TB? How and by whom will it be used and what for?" Or, if you can guess what the interviewer is aiming for, state the assumption and go from there "If we assume it's gonna stay at <10TB for the next couple of years or even longer, then..." Then the interviewer can interrupt and change the assumptions to his needs.
  • tekknik 2y ago
    The interview question made it clear it was a maximum of 6TiB. With this, one can assume it’s not growing yet still think the interviewer either doesn’t know this isn’t big data or that they want to test their knowledge.
    • valenterry 2y ago
      From what the comment tells, the interview question said that the maximum IS 6TiB. There was no further information given, so I assume it didn't make any assumptions about how it might change. Even if it would say "it will stay at 6TiB" I would probably prefer a senior candidate to briefly question it, such as "It is surprising that we know it will stay at 6TiB and if this were a real project I'd try to at least sanitycheck that this requirement is really correct, but for now I'll assume this is a given..." At least if, as the interviewer, I told them to treat the challenge similar to a real request/project and not to not-question the given numbers etc.
• drubio 2y ago
  It's almost a law "all technical discussions devolve into interview mind games", this industry has a serious interview/hiring problem.
• layer8 2y ago
  You shouldn’t guess what they expect, you should say what you think is right, and why. Do you want to work at a company where you would fail an interview due to making a correct technical assessment? And even if the guess is right, as an interviewer I would be more impressed by an applicant that will give justified reasons for a different answer than what I expected.
  • skeaker 2y ago
    >Do you want to work at a company where you would fail an interview due to making a correct technical assessment? How much do they pay? How long has it been since my last proper meal? How long until my rent is due?
• andoando 2y ago
  Its great if the interviewer actually takes time to sort out the questions you have, cause seemingly simple questions to you have a lot of assumptions you made. I had an interview "design an app store". I tried asking, ok an app store has a ton of components, which part of the app store are you asking exactly? The response I got was "Have you ever used an app store? Design an app store". Umm ok.
  • weebull 2y ago
    Red flag - walk away. Interview did it's job.
• oivey 2y ago
  Engineering for scalability here is the single server solution that you throw away later when scale is needed. The price is so small (in this case) for the simple solution that you should basically always start with it.
• fuzztester 2y ago
  Architecting for scalability doesn't mean disregarding resource costs, though - rather, the opposite. In fact, resource costs are even more important at higher scale, because more resources cost more.
• treflop 2y ago
  I would have had that uncertainty that you are describing when I was a junior dev. But now as a senior, I have the same questions and answers regardless if I’m being interviewed or not.
• otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  You don't need to guess, you can just ask the interviewer. (Shocker, I know.)
• foobarian 2y ago
  But the interview is for a data science position. Why play games with "Ha ha 6 TiB can fit on my PC we actually don't need you?"