I've done a handful of interviews recently where the 'scaling' problem involves something that comfortably fits on one machine. The funniest one was ingesting something like 1gb of json per day. I explained, from first principals, how it fits, and received feedback along the lines of "our engineers agreed with your technical assessment, but that's not the answer we wanted, so we're going to pass". I've had this experience a good handful of times.

I think a lot of people don't realize machines come with TBs of RAM and hundreds of physical cores. One machine is fucking huge these days.

The wildest part is they’ll take those massive machines, shard them into tiny Kubernetes pods, and then engineer something that “scales horizontally” with the number of pods.

> but that's not the answer we wanted

You could have learned this if you were better about collecting requirements. You can tell the interviewer "I'd do it like this for this size data, but I'd do it like this for 100x data. Which size should I design this for?" If they're looking for one direction and you ask which one, interviewers will tell you.

In interviews just give them what they are looking for. Don't overthink it. Interviews have gotten so stupidly standardized as the industry at large copied the same Big Tech DSA/System Design/Behavioral process. And therefore interview processes have long been decoupled from the business reality most companies face. Just shard the database and don't forget the API Gateway

I recently had to parse 500MB to 2GB daily log files into analytical information for sales. Quick and dirty, the application would of needed 64GB RAM and work laptop only has 48GB RAM. After taking time cleaning it up, it was using under 1GB of RAM and worked faster by only retaining records in RAM if need be between each day.

It is not about what you are doing, it is always about how you do it.

This was the same with doing OCR analysis of assembly and production manuals. Quick and dirty, it would of took over 24 hours of processing time, after moving to semaphores with parallelization it took less than two hours to process all the information.

Yes, but then how are these people going to justify the money they're spending on cloud systems?... They need to find only reasons to maintain their "investment", otherwise they could be held as incompetent when their solution is proven to be ineffective. So, they have to show that it was a unanimous technical decision to do whatever they wanted in the first place.

This kind of bad interview is rife. It’s often more a case of guess what the interviewer thinks than come up with a good solution.

Every one of these cores is really fast, too!

“there’s no wrong answer, we just want to see how you think” gaslighting in tech needs to be studied by the EEOC, Department of Labor, FTC, SEC, and Delaware Chancery Court to name a few

let’s see how they think and turn this into a paid interview