🧠 Knowledge brings sorrow 💧
I hate going through interviews with less qualified specialists than I am.
They ask you a question:
"Have you ever scaled High Load databases?"
And since I have had enough experience, I recall how we designed a distributed system with geo-replication, a bunch of master-slave replicas, sharding, connection to OLAP systems, local databases with projections from the main one, and a bunch of other very complex things.
But myself, I didn't deploy these databases and didn't set up their communication, because it's so complex that even several Senior Database Architects struggled with this task for months.
So I honestly answer:
"I designed, but didn't deploy"
The interviewer writes down:
"No experience with database scaling"
And so it goes with a bunch of subtle questions, I honestly answer each of them, and at the very end, I start asking questions, and it turns out...
Firstly, the current database simply doesn't fit the architecture tasks and scaling it would be 10 times more expensive than using an available external solution that would fully cover the need. And there's no reason not to use it.
And secondly, the interviewer has only 1-2 years of experience...
So he, with his 1-2 years of experience, is sure that "we need to scale the database".
And I, since I've been dealing with these problems for many years, understand that we don't need to scale the database, but rather change the architecture a bit to save 10 times the time and effort.
Only in the end, I, with my knowledge and doubts, am a semi-poker loser, and this middle specialist is a maestro of monetization.
Because I am overwhelmed by the weight of my knowledge and the understanding of the infinity of my ignorance, and he doesn't have that yet.
In short, gentlemen Sunyer and other experienced specialists, we should be more confident like the young ones, because in reality, nobody knows anything, and there's nothing bad about it.