A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
interviewing.io
A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
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Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#2I'm very excited to see a guide that focuses on the process of the interview itself related to system design. There are plenty of "how to design twitter" resources out there, but for many of us, we really need to better understand the system design interview process itself. Thanks so much for putting this together, can't wait to see parts 3 & 4!
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#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 guide you won’t be an expert, but you’ll be well on your way to being a better engineer and a much better interview candidate."
A better engineer, no less! Wow, this must be some magical guide. I have to read it now. Also what does this say about our industry. "You want to be a surgeon but don't have the experience? Ever cut a tomato? You're halfway there. If you've ever made a sandwich, you've got this. Nurse!"
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#4I've only read up to Part Two so far but find the guide is extremely helpful and resonates with other resources (i.e Grokking the System Design Interview) and with my own experiences for what I believe is the very broken interview process that we face today.
Highly recommend. Interviewing.io is one of the best resources for those doing prep today and the team behind it is awesome.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#5A lot of system design guides do enunciate on the fundamental concepts of system design such as scaling, design patterns etc. But explaining how to actually approach the problem before the interviewer and explaining what they're looking for and not looking for is what makes this guide unique. Otherwise, by the time the candidate gets to the meat of the problem, the interviewer might have already lost interest in them. So great job guys!
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#6I love a few things about this guide. Firstly, that is acknowledges the fact that interviewing for a thing is different than actually doing the thing. Secondly, that it takes the position that system design interviews are (or should be) more about _how_ you approach a problem than about knowing the details of distributed systems.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#7"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…
It's kind of true if you just think about the beginning of the long tail as the end point.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#8"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…
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.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#9We'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 technical that they claim to understand. Our philosophy is how well you understand something you claim to know well is indicative of the depth and breadth of your technical knowledge in general. There are plenty of opportunities in this to ask about design and get to know how people think when it comes to design. I think it helps to eliminate false negatives and false positives.
Re: A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview
#10"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…
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 bit (no, not the issue here)
> If you have an issue with people leveling up, good luck to you.