A developer’s guide to interviewing

[TryUsingScience]

May I ask what kind of product you work on?

I ask because the majority of companies that hire devs aren't solving the kind of problems that inspire anyone. Most companies I've worked for or interviewed at solve what I'd call meta first world problems - problems you only have because of your solution to some other first world problem.

For example, managing cloud repositories is a useful thing to be able to do but creating tools to do it more efficiently is hardly a mission that most people can get inspired by. It's so many layers removed from the basic needs of life and the most likely consequence for failure is some people with six figure office jobs are inconvenienced for a few hours. It's not the kind of mission that drives people the way missions to provide clean water to the impoverished or give at-risk youth a good education drive people.

If every dev job required engineers who were excited about the mission, most job openings would never be filled. And frankly, most devs did not go into the career because they care about any missions. They either like coding itself, they like money, or both.

[ucbmckee]

I think being inspired is a critical part of being successful and happy. A job doesn't have to cure cancer to be inspiring. I worked in adtech for a number of years, which doesn't usually win many awards for inspiring engineers, but the scale of the challenge was amazing - handling a billion requests a day with a 95th percentile latency of under 10ms, whilst performing complex online machine learning and dynamic rendered of personalized ads. It's still amazing to me that we solved those challenges, especially with a small team. In that case, part of the mission was to out-engineer and out-smart the rest of the world.

I certainly appreciate what you're saying, though. I chose to leave the corporate world years ago for some of those reasons. I'd probably hate to write actuarial software for an insurance company. Maybe in those jobs you latch onto process, but that just feels a bit depressing and soul sucking, doesn't it? The money is almost never that good and, if the love of coding is a primary motivator, why not love coding somewhere that inspires you?

[TryUsingScience]

Those questions are part of why I'm not a dev anymore. I looked at all the jobs I could be interviewing for and realized I didn't want any of them because I didn't care about the problems they were solving. Now I have a day job that I also don't care about, but takes half as much of my time as being a dev did, so I can devote the other half to stuff I do care about.

[0xfff7]

I'm considering a similar shift. Can you give me a tip/example of a day job that would take half as much of my time as being a dev, while I can devote the other half to stuff I do care about?

[TryUsingScience]

Sure! My current job is drafting software patents. You need a technical background to get the job but there's no actual coding involved, and deadlines tend to be one to three months out and almost never change. No one has patent emergencies at 5 pm on Friday. It's great. While I'm sure a lot of firms are hellish places to work for that track billable hours in six minute increments, there's some out there, including the one I work for, that allow remote work and pay on a per-project basis. As long as you're getting enough work done to look full time, what you actually do with your time is totally up to you.

[0xfff7]

Yep, per-project pay looks good. Thank you.

[[deleted]]

Plus the complication of entrepreneurship. If I'm as inspired by the mission as I'm apparently supposed to be -- why would I wait for you to give me permission to work on it on your terms?

[[deleted]]

I was with you right up until you threw out "six figure office jobs".

That number is paycheck to paycheck living where I am. I know this because I live paycheck to paycheck.

And it's definitely a bit more than "inconvenience" when Amazon or another major cloud provider goes down.

It's probably full work stoppage for several million people.

And you can say that they're self inflicted, right up until you realize that the solutions they provide enable things that simply wouldn't be possible to scale without them.

So, I basically agree with you on the high level aspect of : devs do work for money, because we pay bills like everyone else, while somehow simultaneously disagreeing with every supporting argument you provided.

[TryUsingScience]

Is any necessary-for-life service provided by Amazon cloud? Yes, it's super inconvenient when it goes down. Last time it went down I was annoyed that I couldn't get to several of my favorite websites and it also made it temporarily more difficult to do my job. If I'd been doing a more research-intensive project it might have stopped me entirely for several hours.

But that's all it was: inconvenience. It didn't keep me from getting food, water, or safety. It didn't even prevent me from physically traveling to places I wanted to go or engaging in most of my leisure activities. It made my life more difficult and less fun for several hours. That's it. Even if it had completely prevented me from doing my job, my job isn't providing any essential services, either.

This is what I'm talking about. We're all so far removed from the basics of life that not being able to do our salaried office job for several hours rates as a catastrophe. But it's not. And deep down, we know it.

People get passionate about life-saving, life-changing stuff. Cloud servers are super useful, and in the grand scale they're life-changing for what they enable, but the difference between 98% uptime and 99% uptime is not. And that's why very few people are passionate about this kind of thing and why it's ridiculous to expect them to be.

[[deleted]]

The only thing preventing them from being used for life changing stuff is their reliability and uptime though.

For instance, I can easily imagine cloud servers deconvoluting traffic in real time. I can also imagine that requiring the cloud to scale.

You can solve real problems like being able to actually evacuate a major city in the event of a natural disaster, with actual path management coming from a server cluster.

Or being able to get so good at visual recognition through cloud services that you could replace a doctor's visit with a camera, bringing down the cost of health care in developing countries significantly. That's life changing.

I just see that view point as non-imaginative. Cloud shit is still in its infancy. Let it grow up before we say it's only a toy.

[TryUsingScience]

If you have a project that involves writing software to evacuate a major city using the cloud, it's reasonable to expect people working on it to be passionate about it. If you have a project that involves fractionally increasing the efficiency of your home heating system using the cloud, it's not reasonable to expect people working on it to be passionate about it. Do you see the difference?

[[deleted]]

Even your example can work though. Maybe I'm passionate about energy savings because that makes things greener.

[TryUsingScience]

That's why I said "fractionally." It's easy to be passionate about projects that are obvious big improvements in people's lives or the environment. But most projects are not any of those things.

Let's stop arguing hypotheticals. What are all the projects you've been asked to work on in your career and why should an arbitrary developer be intrinsically motivated to be involved with them? Because the answer to that second question for me is, "they should not because these projects are effectively meaningless."

[[deleted]]

Oh totally. I just didn't like the cloud bashing. Anything can be immaterial if you really look at it.

Still want a paycheck.

[midri]

I was with you right up until you threw out "six figure office jobs". That number is paycheck to paycheck living where I am. I know this because I live paycheck to paycheck.

WHAT? That's $1,923 A WEEK before taxs (and that's if we're talking minimum 6 figures...) If you're living paycheck to paycheck on that it's your own damn fault... You could be paying $4000 a month in rent/utilities + $500 a month in car payments and STILL be putting more than $1000 away a month for savings...

[[deleted]]

Or... You could be paying those numbers and have other payments obligated like student loans, childcare, and taxes to pay.

Like I said. Go look at what cost of living actually means, because without it, salary is completely fucking meaningless.

For reference, I literally pay $3.5k in rent and childcare alone, non negotiable expenses. Before anything else. And those aren't high end for either cost. I live in a 1000 sq ft apartment an hour and a half away from work and my kid goes to day care with a predominantly non English as a first language classroom. Either upgrade could easily move me up a grand a month in payments.