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by bdbdkdksk 241 days ago
I had a job interview like this recently: "what's the most technically complex problem you've ever worked on?"

The stuff I'm proudest of solved a problem and made money but it wasn't complicated for the sake of being complicated. It's like asking a mechanical engineer "what's the thing you've designed with the most parts"
3 comments
mboerwink 241 days ago
I think this could still be a very useful question for an interviewer. If I were hiring for a position working on a complex system, I would want to know what level of complexity a prospect was comfortable dealing with.
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arethuza 241 days ago
I was once very unpopular with a team of developers when I pointed out a complete solution to what they had decided was an "interesting" problem - my solution didn't involve any code being written.
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SoftTalker 241 days ago
I suppose it depends on what you are interviewing for but questions like that I assume are asked more to see how you answer than the specifics of what you say.

Most web jobs are not technically complex. They use standard software stacks in standard ways. If they didn't, average developers (or LLMs) would not be able to write code for them.

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everforward 241 days ago
Yeah, I think this. I've asked this in interviews before, and it's less about who has done the most complicated thing and more about the candidate's ability to a) identify complexity, and b) avoid unnecessary complexity.

I.e. a complicated but required system is fine (I had to implement a consensus algorithm for a good reason).

A complicated but unrequired system is bad (I built a docs platform for us that requires a 30-step build process, but yeah, MkDocs would do the same thing.

I really like it when people can pick out hidden complexity, though. "DNS" or "network routing" or "Kubernetes" or etc are great answers to me, assuming they've done something meaningful with them. The value is self-evident, and they're almost certainly more complex than anything most of us have worked on. I think there's a lot of value to being able to pick out that a task was simple because of leveraging something complex.

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