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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

The way it typically fall aparts for my candidates is I ask about optimizations, they say X could be cached, then I ask about cache invalidation and lo and behold, it didn't even occur to them that the cache needs to be invalidated at some point, so they blurt something along the lines of doing the entire expensive operation again and checking it against the cache, or something similarly nonsensical.

More common than I'd like to admit.

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Isn’t it better to know you can add a cache to reduce latency, even if you’re not sure how to invalidate it?

The problem isn't demonstrating understanding of what a cache does conceptually, in fact any SWE worth their salt ought to be able to explain caching. The problem is if the candidate's decision to add a cache causes the system behavior to become obviously incorrect upon an ounce of further inspection, because this demonstrates a lack of foresight about local maxima vs global maxima, and systems are all about trade-offs at the macro scale.

Caching is an easy thing to blurt out in an interview setting, but not all problem spaces benefit from caching and caching often isn't the only available solution, or the most ideal one.

I started typing no, but then....

I honestly can't decide which would be worse: a developer who literally doesn't know what a cache is or one who installs caches with bad invalidation policies.