I worked at AMZN for a bit and the complexity is not exactly arbitrary; it's political. Engineers and managers are highly incentivized to make technical decisions based on how they affect inter-team dependencies and the related corporate dynamics. It's all about review time.
I have seen one promo docket get rejected for doing work that is not complex enough... I thought the problem was challenging, and the simple solution brilliant, but the tech assessor disagreed. I mean once you see there is a simple solution to a problem, it looks like the problem is simple...
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
