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I worked with a lot of engineers in my 40+ year engineering career. One thing that most engineers don't like is ambiguity. I didn't like it either, until mid

I worked with a lot of engineers in my 40+ year engineering career. One thing that most engineers don't like is ambiguity. I didn't like it either, until mid career when I was thrown into an environment where the customers didn't really know what they wanted, and it was impossible to explore all of the solution space within time and budget constraints. I ended up thriving in this environment, but I watched as many qualified and experienced engineers floundered and over-stressed themselves. The attrition rate in this environment was about 80%. To survive, I had to use intuition, speculation, and innovation -- things I had not used much in my previous engineering roles. I sadly watched while a lot of really good engineers chose to move on, or were assigned to less relevant roles. In this case, I perceive that the author (Jose) was looking for firm requirements, and did what he could to elicit them, but the Kagi folks were just looking for innovation and a demonstration of competency. They didn't care as much about the details of the submittal as they did about seeing what the candidate would do without specific requirements.

josecodea 1y ago
> They didn't care as much about the details of the submittal as they did about seeing what the candidate would do without specific requirements. This would be acceptable in a world where time is infinite. The reality is that they are going to churn through -who knows- how many candidates, as if it was worthless, as if it was a game. If they really wanted people to spend little time on the solution, they could include that bit of info in their instructions. Clearly, they omit that bit on purpose. Obviously this is not their first rodeo, they must have done this for a long amount of time now.
- anonymousiam 1y ago
  As I said above, I did a lot of this when time and money constraints severely limited exploration of the solution space, yet I succeeded most of the time. Guessing is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. An "educated guess" is based upon knowledge and experience, but little more. I don't really know that this is what Kagi was looking for though. Perhaps they wanted something more than a guess but less than a full solution. Maybe just enough to gauge the confidence of the candidate. The "new business" environment often involves a lot of guesswork.

josecodea 1y ago

> They didn't care as much about the details of the submittal as they did about seeing what the candidate would do without specific requirements. This would be acceptable in a world where time is infinite. The reality is that they are going to churn through -who knows- how many candidates, as if it was worthless, as if it was a game. If they really wanted people to spend little time on the solution, they could include that bit of info in their instructions. Clearly, they omit that bit on purpose. Obviously this is not their first rodeo, they must have done this for a long amount of time now.

anonymousiam 1y ago
As I said above, I did a lot of this when time and money constraints severely limited exploration of the solution space, yet I succeeded most of the time. Guessing is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. An "educated guess" is based upon knowledge and experience, but little more. I don't really know that this is what Kagi was looking for though. Perhaps they wanted something more than a guess but less than a full solution. Maybe just enough to gauge the confidence of the candidate. The "new business" environment often involves a lot of guesswork.