
Ask HN: How to get experience with scale as an engineer? - eyeino
Hey everyone.<p>Feedback that I frequently receive from prospective employers is that I don’t have experience dealing with scaling an app for many users, presumably concurrent users. This feedback comes from video streaming startups, primarily. I apply for full-stack positions, mostly.<p>How do I get this experience without being in a situation where I have many users at my disposal?
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davismwfl
Frankly, you can't get that specific experience without having a job doing it.
Most everyone who has it today is because they grew with something from early
on, or had a job interning or potentially did really well on the interview
problems. I started on smaller systems that were distributed in the 90's then
we went to large client/server then of course back to distributed solutions
with the web. For me I scaled with a few different companies, the first
problem I worked was initially small but went from 10's of thousands of users
to millions of active users per week in like 6-9 months (dotcom days) so to me
that was crazy stuff. Today what we did wouldn't be so remarkable but it was
at the time and led me to keep solving problems like that.

I'll suggest a couple of things to try (not necessarily any order or
preference). Do what most current people have done, get in on a small
startup/company that hasn't yet scaled and scale up with the team. At the same
time you should study up on scale problems so that you know the issues/answers
even though you haven't dealt with them yet yourself. The study part will help
with interviews until you have the experience to point at -- but even then you
still need to understand the problems.

One other idea which is a little more involved, but pretty fun too. Create
your own public experiment using one of the cloud providers where you build an
endpoint/site that does some complex problem (pick something in the area you
want to get a job) concurrently and then load test it and work through issues
so that you can point someone to that repository as part of your learning
experience. I have actually done this myself a number of times experimenting,
not really for showing anyone but so I could understand issue(s) better. You
might blow a few bucks (nothing crazy) on AWS or GCP/Azure to experiment but
it will be invaluable for your knowledge.

As a hiring tech mgr when I am hiring for scale I look at people who have the
experience first, those who have attempted and have the fundamentals second
and lastly I'll consider someone smart who has the education (informal or
formal) but lacks the experience if they have the enthusiasm and right
attitude. I don't think I am unique in that thought process, maybe that helps
you think through it.

~~~
eyeino
Hey davismwfl, thank you x1000 for such a considered reply. I'll see about
doing one of those experiments, likely with video.

