The current state of tech interviews is a zero interest rate phenomenon
A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
181–190 of 399 posts
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
98% of what you'd be inclined to diagram out and explain for a system design interview isn't remotely proprietary. People are generally looking for a high-level overview of a system you've worked on to see a) that you've really worked on it and b) you can explain it such that it makes sense. Sure, folks will ask you to drill down here and there for more detailed info, but if someone pokes on something where the detai…
I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't anything you or anyone else developed on company time at another company be owned by that company and thus proprietary? In practice I can't imagine the spirit of any law would be violated by doing an architecture diagram, but it seems likely (to me, at least) the word of the law would be violated.
Most people barely consider this. In the old days, before leet code interviews, I had people give me code samples. One guy gave me a code sample from some telecom carrier's billing system. It wasn't good. It was also bad that he gave us a proprietary code sample, so he got no points for that either.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#183I got such fatigue from scrolling through so very much prologue, introduction, expectation-setting, and general "here is what we are going to say and here is how you may expect we will say it" fluff that I gave up, pages in, before getting to any apparent content.
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Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#184We'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…
I like this... in theory. But I don't think I'm allowed to give you a system diagram and detailed explanation of systems I've worked on, because obviously they're proprietary. That seems like a problem. How do your candidates normally work around this? Does everyone just talk about hobby or open-source systems they've worked on?
See the reason ops thing works is this can even be applied to something you haven't worked on but purely as a passion project on the side. If you are Saying "oh what if I don't have side projects" you do realize people spend/waste 3+ months going these interviews + tons of mock interviews with companies they have no intention of joining. What does it say about if you are telling me you'd rather waste valuable personal time that way instead of building something fun?
I'm fact I'd even say that even if you haven't built a side project, I'd still use op's technique and ask the candidate to talk about and white board a system they would like to build and then dive deeper from there. Heck I'd even tell this to them before an interview!
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#185I think to be frank, this gamification of interviews is BS. I’ve built actual production systems at scale. The fact that I need to follow a guide to “demonstrate” my ability to someone who 9/10 hasn’t built (or couldn’t build) anything at scale in production shows where we are in the absurdity matrix.
I like to work with companies that make a lot of profit on their 5 digit customers where Single machine is enough. But we can make it 3 behind an LB. I absolute hate business whose infra is a bunch of message broker, lambda, queue .. yet make little money.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be true of SRE roles, but not really true for most engineers, particularly not where I currently work. I wasn't completely clear but what I'd be asking for here is how to predict and design for bottlenecks, not how to mitigate active disasters. Also making a queue bigger is a bad reflexive response to queues being full. I was very involved in the SEV review (postmortem) process at Facebook and witnessed lo…
do you work at google? most engineering roles ive been in engineers absolutely own their systems and take on call rotations. I agree though, hasty response is the mark of a junior eng
I do, but I don't interview SREs. "Production down" situations are hopefully rare, so the purpose of the interview is to understand if the engineer can plan ahead by adding monitoring, logging, and knobs, and to know how to design for scale. I don't really ask about what to do in a fire because many people don't have that experience.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#187I got such fatigue from scrolling through so very much prologue, introduction, expectation-setting, and general "here is what we are going to say and here is how you may expect we will say it" fluff that I gave up, pages in, before getting to any apparent content.
Part 2 link at the bottom starts getting more specific: https://interviewing.io/guides/system-design-interview/part-...
I like some parts of part 1 too, like this paraphrased quote from a senior FB engineer “I’ve learned more about distributed systems reading the internal interview wiki at FB than anything I ever actually built myself… the actual systems at scale are designed by platform teams and most engineers don’t have to think about the impact of dumping a billion messages on a queue, because the infra team will handle it”.
Goes to show what a ridiculous game we’re all forced to play in tech.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this... in theory. But I don't think I'm allowed to give you a system diagram and detailed explanation of systems I've worked on, because obviously they're proprietary. That seems like a problem. How do your candidates normally work around this? Does everyone just talk about hobby or open-source systems they've worked on?
See the reason ops thing works is this can even be applied to something you haven't worked on but purely as a passion project on the side. If you are Saying "oh what if I don't have side projects" you do realize people spend/waste 3+ months going these interviews + tons of mock interviews with companies they have no intention of joining. What does it say about if you are telling me you'd rather waste valuable persona…
I’ll tell you precisely what it says about me:
I put in 60 hour weeks at my current job, except for a month before I change jobs, where I put in an additional 2 hours/night to prep for interviews, because that’s what will benefit me for every other company.
I care about my career and my family, so I don’t have the luxury of spending it on passion projects outside of work. I’d rather spend the precious little time I have left on my real hobbies and family/friends.
It doesn’t communicate that I’m a bad engineer. On the contrary it communicates that I give my all at work.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#189I am on the interviewer side of ~1 system design interview per week and have done probably around 100 of them at Google and other companies. Most of the advice here is good, although it could be condensed quite a bit. The biggest red flag for me as an interviewer is when candidates list off concepts or technologies they don't understand. DO NOT say things like "we can't do this because of the CAP theorem" or "we shou…
> I feel like I can easily see through interview practice or coaching, so I don't recommend spending more than an hour or so "preparing" for system design interviews. I'm very surprised by this recommendation which doesn't match my experience at all. First, lots of candidates don't have experience building such systems, so they need to learn by reading books and articles. Second, the candidates need to be familiar wi…
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Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#190I am on the interviewer side of ~1 system design interview per week and have done probably around 100 of them at Google and other companies. Most of the advice here is good, although it could be condensed quite a bit. The biggest red flag for me as an interviewer is when candidates list off concepts or technologies they don't understand. DO NOT say things like "we can't do this because of the CAP theorem" or "we shou…
No offense meant, but your comment already shows your inherent bias. You are looking for people who have solved specific system design problems. That means you are already being overlay narrow in your selection criteria. I have a background in quant dev and HFT for example. When I was doing system design for big tech (at L6 level), I found that the kind of system design questions asked had very little overlap with my…
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