There might be some good points buried in this post, but all I get is bitterness without much self-reflection. They seem like they'd be difficult to work with and would blame you for it.
It seems to be basically rambling to the point of showing a picture of himself to prove he exercises??
To each their own but, I wonder if his failure in interviews is not a skills issue but an attitude one...
- if it's a super difficult problem, remark how fascinating it is and ask the interviewer how often they're doing this stuff
- if it's FizzBuzz or something else that is solved and has a known value, propose hardcoding the answer as a constant and printing it without doing any computation, and see how that goes over
- if it's not one of these, you might be in a 10% case
My favorite was when I applied at, let's call it "StoreJogger" at as entry level engineer. This guy comes in for the technical interview and asks me a question that basically boils down to "how would you make StoreJogger?" and I remember thinking that if I knew the answer, I sure as shit wouldn't be in there. Yeah I guess it was technically a relevant question.
That is a systems design question and would have been reserved for Senior/Staff+ level hires. I have learned there is a whole delivery framework for providing that answer and I would not ask that of entry-level engineering. Assuming it was entry level.
People in hiring positions basically want productivity. That largely means they want people who will slot into whatever problem is at hand and tackle it effectively. The minute you approach the situation with "this is a stupid pointless problem you have asked me to solve" you failed the test. Even if it's only implicit and through subtle use of language, this will come across.
The good candidates apply to some jobs, get hired, and stop applying. Some terrible candidates will apply to hundreds of jobs, never get hired for long, and just keep applying on every job posting. So a small minority of terrible coders end up being a disproportionately large fraction of interviewees.
Fixing these types of problems and putting systems in place so they don't regress is the job. Working with others who may not have your same perspective or background is the job.
What it describes is actually total mickeymouse bullshit, and besides diagnosing the technical problem/fixes it accurately describes the more human/social root causes.
The dude is just experienced enough to be tired of explaining repetitive and stupid problems that are easily avoided in a polite and patient manner. Stick around long enough and I think it happens to us all..
> Company said “their site was slow” and they didn’t know why. Turns out they had two database clusters: one for production and one for research. The research cluster had 8 instances costing $5,000 per month total. The production cluster had 2 instances costing $500 per month total. The research cluster hadn’t been used in two years. The non-technical company owners had just accepted their system was slow for the past couple years without ever looking into possible fixes because, once again, “the cloud means we never have to manage anything. only agile story point product features matter.”
I'm not sure why we should try to apologize for or further normalize this level of negligence/incompetence? Of course things slip if you're tracking the wrong metrics, and if your approach to cost-management ignores huge actual waste while you make the problem worse by doubling down on hiring newbies, bloating do-nothing middle management or product at the expense of engineering, over-working what seniors you decide to keep, etc.
Fixing honest mistakes is, of course, part of the job. Fixing other people's negligence/incompetence/indifference should not be part of the job, nor compensating for other people's greed when they fail to think through their race-to-the-bottom well enough.
And if shoveling shit actually is the job, then just interview for that. If we're interviewing for 10-20 years of experience and a CS degree, that creates an expectation that the work that needs to be done has some relation to those criteria.
It's surprisingly easy for this to happen even with competent people in charge. Again, fixing it is the job and why you're paid well.
Engineering excellence doesn't happen by accident, and for anyone that works in any kind of technical field I'd expect a higher level of interest and/or pride than this kind of luke-warm "oh well, what did you expect". That attitude isn't a neutral stance, it's part of the problem.
> It's surprisingly easy for this to happen even with competent people in charge.
Exactly what management at Boeing is saying to regulators and the public while they cut corners on engineering, wreck a company that was around before they were alive, and fail-upwards with golden parachutes.
I'm not suggesting you need to lose sleep over every decline in quality everywhere, but your casual stance that cleaning up other people's messes is your whole job description is very likely a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if you're normalizing this then people that do like quality have to fight that much harder for it.
Or you can just be the guy that yells that everyone else is doing it wrong and then wonder why you don't get hired
This is my last reply. You have a good day.
This is something I've realized more and more as I've grown older. In my opinion, this stuff to 'clean up' it just more opportunities for someone like me.
I found this quote and I can understand, but if you are also lucky enough to know such people, couldn't you use such connections to help bolster your own career?
While there are people out there making millions joining the right company at the right time, imo I would be happy with making 150k at my next position (depending on the area of course, I really wish WFH was still popular to allow people to live in areas with a lower cost of living), an amount which the author seems to thing is not much. To be fair though, the also has more experience and seniority over me based on his article