[sb8244]

One thing I don't understand regarding resume padding like this (which I do think totally happens) is how do you justify it when someone asks questions about whether it was necessary? It could be very subtle too if they know their stuff and want to see if you know it.

It seems like this would come back to bite in any decent interview.

[revvx]

> how do you justify it when someone asks questions about whether it was necessary?

I know of a local company whose data solution consists of dumping into Segment > S3 files > Pentaho (IIRC) > RedShift, and then using two different BI solutions, depending on the analyst. It needs two full-time data engineers just to keep it alive.

Now the funny part: a dump of their production database is less than 2GB and that isn't going to change any time soon: they don't make that much data to begin with, and their business model doesn't scale.

The argument used for building this new infrastructure is that users used to query directly into the production database and that would allegedly slow down their web app. So they decided they should take an "industry standard" path of handling data. C-levels were too afraid to "just use SQL" and instead asked "what is Amazon doing?".

It is an absolute mess and costed three months of the engineering team just to set up the application to generate the right events, but at least business people has access to data without having to stop an engineer in the hallway.

I don't think this will ever come back to bite anyone in an interview because the fact the dataset has less than 2GB will never come up: interviewers charitably assume that it wasn't overkill or that the person isn't padding the resume.

I frankly believe that a lot of places are like that. We criticize web developers all the time for over-engineering simple apps, but everyone is doing the same in other areas, we just can't see it like we do with web apps.