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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

That is what I think interviewers think when I don’t immediately bring up kubernetes and sqs in an architecture interview

depending on the shop? For some kinds of tasks, jumping to kubernets right away would be a minus during interview.

Recommending kubernetes immediately is an insta-rejection for me, if I was an interviewer

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.

So give both answers. Itd would happen all the time in college, or in a thesis defense, where one disagrees with the examiner and one finds oneself in a position of "is this guy trying to trick me!"

Give both answers, and explain why the obvious "hard" answer is wrong

Exactly!!! This is an interviewer issue. You should be guiding them. Get the answers for each scenario out of both sets of interviewees and see if they are facile enough to roll with it. Doing a one shot "quiz" is not that revealing....

> 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.

If people in high stakes environments interpret hedging as a smell - run from that company as fast as you can.

Hedging is a natural adult reasoning process. Do you really want to work with someone who doesn't understand that?

Agreed. I don't really understand the mindset of someone who would consider this sort of hedging a smell. A candidate being able to take vague requirements and clearly state different solutions for different scenarios is an excellent candidate. That would be considered a positive signal for myself and pretty much all the interviewers I've worked with.

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