Unfortunately many of thr same poor UI decisions are baked into Backstage, so soon you’ll have a similar experience deploying code onto your companies development platform.
Of course, it was a conversation and the engineer was happy to let me go in depth on storage after we discussed and dismissed other areas, like the front end, integrations, native apps which were not related to infrastructure.
We also covered other areas like messaging, authentication, authorization, read / write paths, etc… so it was very strange to get the response from the senior manager I got.
At most of the companies I’ve interviewed at (except Google as you note), the hiring manager and principal engineer didn’t understand system design themselves. They only understood how to pattern match against a regurgitated answer.
Case in point, when asked how I’d build Slack, I spent most of the time on data persistence because slack stores all data forever even on the free plan. I got rejected because, “we don’t care how they store data.”
Ok, but that’s still a key part of the system design…
I worked on a project automating some parts of an Azure infrastructure for a big company. Half-way through development, JSON integers returned by Azure changed from strings to ints, back to strings. E.g., "42" became 42, then a few weeks later went back to "42".
This and other API weirdness gave me such Azure PTSD that I promised myself I would never touch it again.
I have family in Austin, and I agree with everything in this post... Except the part about Austin being charming. I don't find anything charming about the arrogant texan attitudes, the mini-malls, and the crappy collage-town bars on 6th street.
They manually scan financial reports for info so they can manually type them into excel, and manually run various formulas and ultimately past the charts into powerpoint so they can fill up a directory full of files that hardly anyone will read.