Complex solutions to simple problems pad resumes.

It's important.

I've been looking for a job recently and my lack of experience with excitedly building expensive overly engineered big piles of stuff to do simple things is really hurting me.

When I suggest simple solutions proportional to the problem size people look at me like I'm some kind of simpleminded ninny.

And then when I describe working systems I've made using the approach on companies that exited north of 10 million, then they usually just think I'm a bullshitter.

10,000 users? Just do a simple lamp stack on a $10 month vps and don't code it like a moron, it's not hard. And it can be delegated to almost anyone, that's important for longevity. That's it, move on with life.

I've even offered to show logs, I mean, it's remarkably bad how hard it is to find work as a cost-cutting product-focused engineer, nobody wants that shit, really.

They want autoscale, prometheus, travis, blah blah blah... as fancy and crazy as possible, an empire of infrastructure instead of infrastructure for an empire... It's a damn cult.

I'm thinking about giving up and giving in. Maybe spend a month and drop $10,000 or whatever on a bunch of the tech just so I can talk about these things.

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The second thing I'm constantly surprised by is how many obvious things are formalized with fancy names, math equations, papers, etc. Stuff I'd think like literally anyone with half a brain would do.

Recently I found out about "CRDT". Apparently I've been doing it for a decade... It's just super simple stuff wrapped in needless formalism, like back when design "patterns" were all the rage. I used to think "why is there a name for that?" it's such basic stuff.

So saying "dude, the emperor has no clothes, here, take my coat" - bad interview strategy and it's hard to rectify because there's like 50 naked emperors and silicon valley culture is on a constant rotating basis of seeing the nakedness of 5 of them and ignoring the other 45.

Maybe what I should do is just a couple throwaway interviews to focus on finding out the current fads and then be able to give the right cultural signals for the ones I actually want.

Great response. We’re all obsessed with infrastructure and over-engineering, myself included. Startups like to think they’re working on the next big thing, so they want to use the tech that the big boys use and bask in their anticipation of scale. You can easily save cost and time to validate your business with smaller hosting approaches, though it does look amateur from the outside. It’s not amateur, it’s smart.

Yeah I've been in LA for 12 years which is much more practical for the most part.

And it's been fine, profitable, revenue generating, sure. Mysql, php, a bit of python, easy stuff.

Honestly I've been wanting to move and try out silicon valley again though and it's been hard because I don't speak that language and frankly I'm skeptical and hostile to it - bad idea. That bad attitude needs to go.

I've been in practical startup land too long so I keep getting stonewalled from getting in to the sv world.

I'm trying to contribute to some companies open source projects recently and then basically earn my way in through labor since I can't do the virtue signaling. It's only been a few weeks, nothing yet.

I gotta learn how to be along for the ride without always trying to reach for the steering wheel.

Hopefully by the end of summer I'll find a lead somewhere.

It's not about the money, it's kinda actually how I want to spend my time for the next year or two.

You could just as well start with one cheap dedicated server and then migrate to the cloud once you know that you need it.

For example, one of my companies is doing hosting and image delivery services for photographers. I started it on one dedicated server, and now 10+ years later it's running on 3 dedicated servers.

My hoster does backups and OS upgrades, so there was never any reason to go into the cloud. Except maybe, if I wanted to burn cash on slow performance ;)