[yodsanklai]

I remember when I prepared for system design interviews in FAANG, I was anxious I would get asked about Paxos (which I learned at school). Now that I'm working there, never heard about Paxos or fancy distributed algorithms. We rely on various high-level services for deployment, partitioning, monitoring, logging, service discovery, storage...

And Paxos doesn't require much maths. It's pretty tricky to consider all possible interleavings, but in term of maths, it's really basic discrete maths.

[motorest]

I'm starting to believe these talks of fancy high-complexity solutions come from people who desperately try to come up with convoluted problems they create for themselves only to be able to say they did a fancy high-complexity solution. Instead of going with obvious simple reliable solutions, they opt for convoluted high-complexity unreliable hacks. Then, when they are confronted by the mess they created for themselves, they hide behind the high-complexity of their solution, as if the problem was the solution itself and not making the misjudged call to adopt it.

It's so funny how all of a sudden every single company absolutely must implement Paxos. No exception. Your average senior engineer at a FANG working with global deployments doesn't come close to even hearing about it, but these guys somehow absolutely must have Paxos. Funny.