Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great way to get BS'd into thinking someone is qualified when they're not. Work sample tests are all you need.
"Awesome, then you've got nothing to worry about!"
Thanks, I can start on Monday
A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
281–290 of 399 posts
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show me a system you’ve worked on that wasn’t put together from knowledge from previous education and jobs (yours and others), documentation from vendors, stack overflow, code generators , etc. I would hate to be a stakeholder in a company whose value depends on employees not talking about and reusing the incremental skills and knowledge gained while working there.
NDAs don't care where you sourced your knowledge from.
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Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#283I 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.
Yeah, I don't think I want a job that asks such questions. I've done the webscale BS. I've done actual architecture that exists in reality. At this stage in my career there's nothing an interviewer can do but insult me. You might say that this is hubris about my own skill but it has nothing to do with how good I am. My resume has a LOOONG track record of consistent work in the industry. Call my references, do some ac…
If you can't be in a room with a more junior engineer and explain your ideas in simple language by drawing a few boxes on a whiteboard, then yeah you are probably not a good fit for these positions.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't think I want a job that asks such questions. I've done the webscale BS. I've done actual architecture that exists in reality. At this stage in my career there's nothing an interviewer can do but insult me. You might say that this is hubris about my own skill but it has nothing to do with how good I am. My resume has a LOOONG track record of consistent work in the industry. Call my references, do some ac…
> There's a good chance at my career phase I have more experience than the interviewer. This happens a lot. I was once in the process for google and was asked a time series systems design problem. I said, “lets throw this in a time series db”. The interviewer had no idea what a time series’s db was. Mind you this was an interview for Google Cloud and the person worked on SPANNER. They also has been at the company for…
What's the sour taste -- what's the problem? Like, what's wrong with being interviewed by someone with less experience than you?
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#285We'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 work for a big tech co, and our interview training explicitly says to not ask candidates about systems they have built in the past, but to ask them to build brand new systems from scratch. This seems completely backwards to me. Is like saying "hey, do you know that relevant on the job experience that you have? we don't want to hear anything about it, here you have a made up scenario". Ok ok, that is a bit cynical.…
> asking candidates to describe real world systems that they have actually built is much more useful at checking their skills than building imaginary systems.
Except those systems are owned by other companies and I have signed agreements not to talk about them.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#286I 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…
A cache is such a red flag when I'm doing a system design interview. I ask people to design a system but the system itself is very write heavy. Like 50 writes per read imbalanced. People will often suggest a cache because it's in the standard interview prep but not actually think about why they need it. They just go right to "I need a cache somewhere".
> I ask people to design a system but the system itself is very write heavy. Like 50 writes per read imbalanced. People will often suggest a cache because it's in the standard interview prep but not actually think about why they need it.
I mean, it's a cool thought process to go "Ooh, maybe I can store up repeated things so I don't need to repeat an expensive access process often!" It's a byproduct of modern computing hardware that we frequently have the luxury of not thinking about caching very often.
I don't think you should punish people for considering a cache. Write caching is a thing, it might just not be applicable for the system you're considering.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#287I 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 get what you are saying, but I have done tech recruiting for a long time and the reality is that everyone claims they have built complex production systems at scale. Everyone has lofty resumes with the choicest buzzwords. Everyone can come up with war stories about how they single-handedly kept the internet alive. And everyone can write the names of a dozen references who can vouch for all of this. The moment you s…
> I get what you are saying, but I have done tech recruiting for a long time and the reality is that everyone claims they have built complex production systems at scale
Then we need a better test, but the gamification and badgering isn’t effective imo.
> And once in a while some genius superstar 10x programmer comes along who is too good for these silly interviews... well that's fine we don't need that arrogance either.
It’s not arrogance to not want to be judged by someone who literally hasn’t done and probably could never do what you’ve accomplished.
The unspoken secret is that most software engineers in the industry (even at FAANGS) can really only add features to existing systems. They can’t build green field.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#288Performative interviews are bullshit. I’ve been working as an Engineer for 20 years - successfully. But you want me to “whiteboard” like a trained monkey?
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#289"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.
They study for the job, not the interview.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#290thought interviewing sucked before? now your resume is in a stack with 300 other dev resumes instead of 3 honestly I may just make my current tech job my last, its increasingly not worth it to get waterboarded like this just to write unit tests
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