A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview

Post by mdm12 » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

rednerrus wrote: post #9

We've gone away from system design interview questions on my team. We ask people to diagram something technical they understand well and the team digs in and asks questions to understand depth and breadth of the candidates understanding. For us it works much better. It's a chance to see how well candidates do in following instructions. It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something…

Post by jstx1 » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

rednerrus wrote: post #9

We've gone away from system design interview questions on my team. We ask people to diagram something technical they understand well and the team digs in and asks questions to understand depth and breadth of the candidates understanding. For us it works much better. It's a chance to see how well candidates do in following instructions. It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something…

Post by debacle » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #14

eternalban wrote: post #3

"You can pass system design interviews even if you’ve never designed distributed systems before. If you have copied files between machines with drag-and-drop, you are halfway there. If you implemented clients or servers or have opened network connections, you’ve got this. This guide will teach you the most important 20% of information that will appear 80% of the time in system design interviews. By the end of this gu…

> "You want to be a surgeon but don't have the experience?" Well, what do surgeons have to do beforehand? Study. This is no different. Most of tech doesn't require fine coordination motor skills that need to be trained in practice, so this comparison is way off. Also, like the excerpt you quoted says, "you won't be an expert" after reading the guide. A surgeon is an expert by any definition.

Post by richardwhiuk » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

eternalban wrote: post #10

reactordev wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is you can become an engineer with no degree whilst you can’t become a surgeon with no degree. The criticism of the writing is dismissing that a lot of people want to go for that promotion or higher tier but due to imposter syndrome or lack of confidence, abstain. This guide is to help them overcome those fears and level up. If you have an issue with people leveling up, good luck to you.

That trivializes our profession and hard earned experience simply because a degree is not a requirement. It is ridiculous to say drag'n'droping something is halfway to being a systems designer. And the anecdote about "experience at facebook" was such nonsense. "I worked at facebook doing something other than distributed systems, and geez, I learned nothing about distributed systems". "QED!" p.s. I missed this ad hom…

Post by slytherone » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

rednerrus wrote: post #9

We've gone away from system design interview questions on my team. We ask people to diagram something technical they understand well and the team digs in and asks questions to understand depth and breadth of the candidates understanding. For us it works much better. It's a chance to see how well candidates do in following instructions. It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something…