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Comment by whamlastxmas | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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 :-).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think more like, how would you prepare and cook the best five course gala dinner for only $10. That requires true skill.

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