Comment by EthanHeilman
11 hours ago
Complete agreement. "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?"
11 hours ago
Complete agreement. "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?"
"That does sound like something nice to have. However, recreating Google Sheets is a substantial undertaking. First, we need to evaluate the business case for duplicating something that already exists to ensure that there is a net benefit in doing so. Second, we need to determine if the business has sufficient capital to see the project through."
There is a difference between being smart and acting smart.
I think that's exactly the point being made. __Acting__ smart gets you paid, not being smart, and that's like, not ideal.
That's a good real world answer, but a terrible SWE interview answer.
Indeed, the proper response is now to vibe code 14 semi functional gsheets clones in parallel
I suspect a lot of businesses are going to make this mistake in the "SaaS is dead" era as companies try to eliminate $50k/mo subscriptions for boring business software, and they figure it's easier to burn AI tokens creating an internal solution they didn't plan on maintaining in the far future.
Funny times we're in right now.
> "now what if we wanted to build it in-house?"
"Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand."
I hate going to work and reinventing wheels all day because the company I work for thinks it's so special that every business function needs a 100% tailored solution to solved problems. I much prefer working somewhere that's able to tailor business processes to conform to existing standards.
But maybe that's just me.
I’ve interviewed a few hundred people. Probably approaching a thousand, if not already. An interview is a scenario, and if you aren’t willing to engage in the scenario that we all agreed to partake in, that’s a huge warning sign that you’re going to be difficult later down the line. The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.
Most real-world scenarios aren't so arbitrary, and hardly any have a "right answer". If I had a candidate that broke out of the box of our interview to give a good answer, and that's not the answer I "want", I'd be more likely to believe the interview question is the problem, not the candidate.
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I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure.
I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not professionals.
Ditto for ones who act like everything is a nail for their coding hammer. A developer who can save a company a couple hundred thousand dollars by not turning something simple into a big coding project is a rare and precious commodity. Or should be, at least.
The thing to do isn't to give demerits for "being difficult". The thing to do is to then add something to the scenario where they get into the thing you want them to get to. "For this, we need better access control than Google Sheets allows us." Or, "We need this to be more closely integrated with our accounting system."
Unless, of course, what you're hiring for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power. Which, honestly, a lot of places are.
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but also maybe its a green flag in that this employee might see the wood for the trees and save the company a lot of money later down the line. In my experience, a lot of engineers can waste a lot of time dicking around re-inventing wheels and whatnot.
While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate [0].
For reference, I think both answers are fine and both perspectives (its a positive or a negative) are equally valid. Its just that I don't think we can confidently state either way.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3ETK7-ZM8
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I also feel it's very easy for a good interviewer to bring the conversation back to the desired scenario.
Anything from "imagine we are in a parallel universe where Google Sheets has not been invented yet" to "how would you design a google sheets competitor" would do the trick.
Source: interviewed hundreds, incl FAANG.
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> The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.
I think a lot of people miss this point.
Real projects are complex and have tons of context at the historic layer, political layer, and technical layer. If I have one hour to do the interview, I need to get to some shared context with the candidate quickly, or else it'll just be an hour of me whining about my job. And I usually don't need someone who is already a senior subject matter expert, so I'm not going to ask the type of question that is so far down the rabbit hole that we're in "wheels haven't been invented yet" territory.
Fundamentally, that's why I'm asking a somewhat generic design question. I do also dig into how they navigated those layers in their past experience, but if I don't see them in action in some way then that's just missing signal I can't hire on, and that helps neither me nor the candidate.
In another company or timeline perhaps I could run a different interview style, but often you're working within the constraints of both what the candidate is willing to do and what the company standardized on (which is my current situation).
I think the contrived scenarios you come up with need to not have a trivial solution. Everything about my brain is optimized for KISS, it breaks everything to turn down simple solutions to reach for something more complex.
Setup Etherpad
Think of it this way: they're paying you lots of money to build something boring that has a lot of prior art/research available to you for free. This could be the easiest money maker in your life.
It's not your problem they're hellbent on building a new wheel. They're willing to pay you!
Chances are, you've thought of your own pain points in whatever they've asked you to build and you've now got an opportunity to shine by solving them and demonstrate your expertise.
There is a tool invented lately, that's very good for solving problems, that are well-researched and had been solved multiple times already. This tool is actually why there is a RAM shortage in the world right now.
Some even say, this tool will replace a lot of workers soon(sic!).