4 ms·

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.

by kmarc 2y ago

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?

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.

by 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?