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Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

"You can pass system design interviews even if you’ve never designed distributed systems before. If you have copied files between machines with drag-and-drop, you are halfway there. If you implemented clients or servers or have opened network connections, you’ve got this. This guide will teach you the most important 20% of information that will appear 80% of the time in system design interviews. By the end of this guide you won’t be an expert, but you’ll be well on your way to being a better engineer and a much better interview candidate."

A better engineer, no less! Wow, this must be some magical guide. I have to read it now. Also what does this say about our industry. "You want to be a surgeon but don't have the experience? Ever cut a tomato? You're halfway there. If you've ever made a sandwich, you've got this. Nurse!"

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The reality is you can become an engineer with no degree whilst you can’t become a surgeon with no degree. The criticism of the writing is dismissing that a lot of people want to go for that promotion or higher tier but due to imposter syndrome or lack of confidence, abstain. This guide is to help them overcome those fears and level up. If you have an issue with people leveling up, good luck to you.

That trivializes our profession and hard earned experience simply because a degree is not a requirement. It is ridiculous to say drag'n'droping something is halfway to being a systems designer. And the anecdote about "experience at facebook" was such nonsense. "I worked at facebook doing something other than distributed systems, and geez, I learned nothing about distributed systems". "QED!"

p.s. I missed this ad hom bit (no, not the issue here)

> If you have an issue with people leveling up, good luck to you.

Just because you work somewhere doesn’t make you an expert at what they do. My Home Depot cashier is incapable of installing the carpet I bought from them. There are levels. Everyone wants to pretend they have FB or Google scale when they are building only to find out they have Ruby on Rails scale after year 4. They don’t need a Stanford grad. They need a feature developer or someone who can break apart the monolith so they can scale beyond a single server or group of servers.

We're in mild agreement, so somewhere there has been a misreading/miscommunication on either my part or yours :O

Our profession is trivial and full of smoke and mirrors, and barely deserving of profession. It's full of people who have literally no clue about what they are doing creating systems which screw over other people.

Just because you're all smoke and mirrors doesn't mean everyone else is.

I agree with you that there's lots of impostors that have no business being called an "engineer". But that hardly means it's not deserving of a profession.

I don't know how this is elsewhere but in Germany you cannot become an engineer without a degree. You can work somewhere in an engineering field but you are no engineer.

And BTW here computer scientists / programmers / developers are officially also not engineers.

> "You want to be a surgeon but don't have the experience?"

Well, what do surgeons have to do beforehand? Study. This is no different. Most of tech doesn't require fine coordination motor skills that need to be trained in practice, so this comparison is way off.

Also, like the excerpt you quoted says, "you won't be an expert" after reading the guide. A surgeon is an expert by any definition.

Study, train, shadow, and intern for 11-13 years.

That's in our terms a Director of Engineering. In medicine it's just a fresh grad.

They study for the job, not the interview.

It's kind of true if you just think about the beginning of the long tail as the end point.

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