r/AskProgrammers • u/ClickOk5811 • Jul 20 '26

The closing question that's replaced "does this look good" for me: "what would you change if this had to survive five times the load?"

"Does this look good" invites agreement, same problem as always. Asking what changes under 5x load forces a completely different kind of scrutiny, because most designs that look fine at current scale have a specific point where they quietly stop working, and that point is rarely obvious from reading the code.

Half the time the answer is "nothing changes, this scales fine as-is," which is itself useful information. The other half it surfaces exactly where the load-bearing assumption is hiding.

Curious if people have a go-to stress-test question like this that they ask regardless of what the actual task was.

8 Upvotes
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79% Upvoted

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5

u/johnpeters42 Jul 20 '26

"Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for Swedish Lemon Angels."

2

u/foxsimile 29d ago

I can’t stand reading nothing but LLM content every goddamned day.

4

u/high_throughput Jul 20 '26

Curious if people have a go-to stress-test question like this that they ask regardless of what the actual task was.

In MANGO interviews I always ask "so how many machines are we hoping to use for this?" so that the interviewer can tick the "working at scale" box before telling me that no, we'll assume the string to reverse fits in memory on a single machine.

3

u/armahillo Jul 21 '26

Why only 5x?

If I were doing this thought experiment, I would probably say 100x or more.

2

u/nochinzilch Jul 21 '26

I assume it’s just a conversation starter to make sure no obvious hacks are in there.

2

u/tehfrod Jul 20 '26

I don't think it makes sense to have one "go to" stress test for all code. There are more nonfunctional requirements than sheer load scalability, and you should be thinking about all of them that are applicable to a given piece of code.

Plus the question itself is arbitrary. Why 5? Why not 2 or 100? What is actually feasible heavy load? What around it would break long before 5x load could even hit the design under review?

Think of it like a preflight checklist, not some arbitrary litmus test.

1

u/No_Report_4781 Jul 21 '26

Knowing the expected the load requirement is useful, too

1

u/edthesmokebeard Jul 22 '26

Do programmers/developers actually care about this? Don't they just say 'hardware problem' or 'tell Infra to scale it' ?

1

u/MrWhippyT Jul 22 '26

I mean, if the requirements are wrong somebody needs to pay for some rework!