Most big tech folks I know are super capable & would ace the interview no problem.

What's funny is how I hear all the time how ineffective big tech engrs are in startup env, how degrees from ivy league are useless, & then I see the most sought-after jobs being held by exactly that group.

Big cope.

Nailing tech interview is a completely different skillset than being a good engineer.

I also prefer system design & assignment-like interviews that represent the actual job over solving puzzles.

While FAANG folks get some flak about not being able to build e2e software, most of it is overblown.

There’s literally no reason for a developer to pick a Windows machine unless they’re developing for that platform.

Constant updates, obnoxious telemetry, ads in the Start menu, Windows is malware itself.

Next stop; eugenics

Blind is such a cesspool; most anonymous platforms are. It’s full of hate speech and TC bragging.

I really don’t understand what people get out of that platform besides being able to gossip incessantly.

I don’t believe anything that comes out of there. People mostly go there to vent & speculate.

The moment you need to mention the details on how to use a certain tech / tool, ADR is the place to stash that in.

Problem is using a mock lib like unittest.mock is super easy & tempting. Whereas DI w/ fakes need to be practiced as it’s not too obvious unless you have written a few thousand loc in that style.

So many takes the easy route and by the time they realize the mocking mess has already been created.

Problem with mocks is that when you have a few thousand lines of teats, it’s really hard to know if you’re testing your SUT (Subject Under Test) or are you testing your mocks.

I have seen and maintained mess created by mocks in RSspec (Ruby), Jest (JS), and Pytest (Python).

First, the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) for a feature will write RFC where all the high level details are captured.

Then before implementing each feature, the detailed architectures are captured in another one / two pager ADR. RFCs defer implementation details to ADR & links to it.

We typically write two kinds of design docs while planning for a feature:

RFC - Request for Comments
ADR - Architecture Decision Records

[cont…]

Mocks and patches can be replaced by fakes & DI in pretty much any languages. Go / Rust make it sorta obvious and in JS/Python/Ruby it requires some discipline since the languages make it so easy to write bleh code.

Google’s SWE book has some nice advice around it:

abseil.io/resources/sw...

Code that requires mocks & patches is smelly. It generally takes working in a PL that doesn’t allow mocking out of the box to learn how to design code that makes them redundant.

IME people who write only in dynamic PLs like Python or JavaScript often throw in mocks just b/c it’s so easy to do.

Not disagreeing with that. But in tech, that gets violated all the time and some people are okay with it. Problem is when employers just expect people to do that.

If someone willingly wants to put in 80 hr weeks in exchange for an agreed upon wage, I don’t see any reason to criticize that.

People know what they’re getting into before joining a company like that. Not for me but I understand if some ~23 y/o really believes in the mission & wants to do it.

Doing MR deployment and database management is hard. It's surprising how often even large companies eschew doing it.