Comment by elric
11 hours ago
> I interviewed with ASML a decade and a half ago and while there was plenty to complain about (eg their tens of millions of lines of absolutely unmaintainable C code)
How is one exposed to tens of millions of lines of unmaintainable code during an interview?
Making the right questions when they ask if you have any questions
Recently I got to know at an interview how company A (big western company) acquired another company years ago and are now working on redeveloping code that was an important part of the acquisition which fails to scale beyond the original use case.
This kind of stuff during interviews is a lot of learning in itself especially if you’re working already in the same area.
yeah, I've gotten this kind of knowledge from an interview before. They let slip a little something as to the project you will be working on, you start asking given the project you described I wonder if... and then they tend to tell you how it is.
> How is one exposed to tens of millions of lines of unmaintainable code during an interview?
You ... ask? I've gotten answers like this just by asking in the interview.
I understood that this was what they (interviewers) complained about and he got an impression about this by hearing their stories?
Yeah I knew plenty people at ASML at the time. I wrote my comment a bit too condensed there, the interview wasn't my only exposure to the place. At the time it was very chaotic (for good and bad), the codebase was awful, there was plenty armwrestling but to my understanding it was mostly armwrestling about the tech, not about island building and the likes.
Like just as an example, they made sure that by every coffee machine there was a whiteboard for general use. The idea was that if you ran into someone at the coffee machine and got talking and suddenly got an idea together, you could immediately jot it down and geek out about it together and work it out in more detail, right there and then. No meeting to plan, no project manager to involve, just work out your idea together. That's not what you'd expect in a company with lots of managers protecting their little islands.