This seemed to be paragraphs of preparatory fluff that never got to the core content.
A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
341–350 of 399 posts
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#342Why would a senior engineer do a system design? Isn't that a role of architect?
For me that questions are in line with the "how much tennis balls would fit in an airlplane?" - fun, but are orthogonal to the SWE roles.
How often SWE does a system design? Maybe in small startups.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 theory yes, in practice ... if that's true, why would anyone ever hire you for your experience? You wouldn't be allowed to use it.
(coming from the standpoint of a historically non-technical individual contributor who is leaning towards technical now, and asking because I want to learn):
But isn't that exactly why you as an interviewer would pose a problem, set up the context that is potentially similar to the work your project would require, and see how the interviewee navigates that?
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#344i am having a problem understanding why FAANG is gatekeeping system design google - search is broke, youtube doesnt make money and is a hotbed of predators facebook - should basically be in prison for aiding war crimes and child suicides netflix - is quickly circling the drain because you can't algorithm creativity amazon - almost all of their products and services lose money apple - siri is slightly better than stub…
What are you suggesting? That these companies have poor system design? That they don't need to hire smart technically minded engineers because their problems aren't technical?
yes.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#345The repetition of "this is different from code" strikes me as odd.
The way I see it, it's identical to code, it just involves more moving parts.
> If two experts designed the same system, you would see two different designs, beautiful and aesthetic in their own way and both as “correct” as the other (and with the accompanying justifications to support them).
That is nonsense. Systems can be optimally designed too, just like code. Even if you have two systems that both meet the requirements for features, performance, reliability, and cost, one is usually objectively better by surpassing the requirements more than the other.
Would you like solution A that is identical to solution B in every way, but can be run with half the hardware, or do you want solution B? Of course you would want solution A.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I can't say about other companies but I have personally done many, many of these interviews over the years and can say with 100% confidence that someone who has spent days/weeks/months studying system design interview material but not had any actual experience building such systems in a production setting will get weeded out in the first few minutes. Now some interview prep might actually help a lot of people, but it…
I may be a counter example, but I did very well at system design interviews at both Google and Meta (level L5), with no experience building such systems. As a matter of fact, my resume didn't mention any such things and everybody was aware I didn't have that experience - recruiters, interviewers. A lot of candidates don't have that background (there are lot of things to do in our field besides building Twitter newsfeed and Google search autocomplete), and companies don't want to exclude them.
Also, you can build knowledge during your preparation. It's not only about "faking" it.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point is good, but in making it, you sound like an adversarial interviewer. You and OP are actually agreeing with "the correct answer is it depends and now let's discuss context". This echoes my experience as interviewer too. It's a red flag when the candidate responds with "the correct answer". That's what OP is calling out. I'm replying here because I get the impression you're looking for "the right answer" as…
> Your point is good, but in making it, you sound like an adversarial interviewer. Most interviewers are adversarial. Let's be honest - if an interviewer wants you to pass a system design interview, they'll make it work. I see this with particular candidates all the time. If we want the person to make it through - we'll let them get through. If we don't want them to get through - no amount of correct and behaviorally…
Pretty much this. You can have experience and also perform well in a system design interview. However, passing some of these rounds involves chance. Some interviewers are looking for specific answers. For example, some interviewers are looking for you to be knowledgeable about recent papers specific to the heavy-hitters problem. Or the two ways to best support lynchpin objects. It’s not so much as dropping well-known building blocks to construct a system but rather the interviewer asking you to design a system requiring specific characteristics you might not have any specialization in building.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can someone less experienced that you gauge your competency for a position that requires more experience than they have? That’s before wondering why they’re asking a question to gauge my competency when they don’t even understand the nuance of the question themselves. An interviewer working on google’s enterprise nosql db but not knowing about (at least on a surface level) the breadth of nosql dbs doesn’t seem cr…
> They also has been at the company for 2 years > How can someone less experienced that you This argument seems to conflate two different things, how long someone has been at a particular company and their (overall) level of experience.
Sure, I was responding to the question purposed.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#349Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#350I 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.
The eight icon legend felt unnecessary for this kind of document.