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Comment by wly_cdgr | Hacker News Reader

Hehe, spill!

I can offer you this: I did a couple rounds of interviews with them, and the hiring manager's pitch to me regarding the type of hard problems they had to solve included "MongoDB keeps crashing because of bad queries."

Needless to say, I decided to bow out after that.

Why is that needless to say? It sounds like they gave you a straight answer.

What's wrong with that answer?

Because it means the challenges you'll face are not because they're solving hard problems, but because their code is awful and their development process is broken.

To be honest isn't that the case at almost every web-focused startup (i.e. almost all tech startups)? We like to tell ourselves we're like NASA rocket scientists but almost all tech challenges the typical software engineers faces (even at places like google/amazon/facebook/etc) are mundane and not require PhD level understanding of computer science.

Forget PhD level, 95%+ of what people do in webdev doesn't require a BS level

When I interviewed at Google a decade ago I asked the interviewer that directly and he admitted most of the work will be maintenance & that sort of challenge (he was a former CS professor).

This was for natural language processing at search so very much the foundation of google's bread & butter/cash cow (pick your favorite metaphor) and something you may think requires pretty sophisticated work. But I guess by then a lot of the fancy work has already been done & I'd have been one of 1000s of programmers working on it.

> even at places like google/amazon/facebook/etc

Even? Those places are probably the worst in that regard. The amount of support programmers for the core is enormous.

Facebook has what, 20 000 developers?

I guess that's how you end up with an iPhone app with 18,000 classes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066518

I mean in the sense that people assume they are doing hard stuff compared to your run-of-the-mill Java EE/.net companies servicing "boring" computing needs of industries like insurance/banking/logistics/etc (which outside of silicon valley is where most - or at least a lot of - software jobs are at).

I would hope they at least have basic CI to catch issues like this.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. They didn't say "MongoDB keeps crashing because it can't support the load we're putting on it right now." They said it keeps crashing because of "bad queries." Leaving aside the fact that no database worthy of the term should ever be crashing due to a "bad query," there's also the fact that a very important component of their architecture (a data store) isn't even close to being reliable. Yet, somehow, the name of the company is "Scale.ai?" It's absurd is what it is.

Ah MongoDB crashes.

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/PYTHON-532

> Leaving aside the fact that no database worthy of the term should ever be crashing due to a "bad query,"

This simplistic assertion only shows your lack of experience working with huge volume of data / txs.

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