I only have experience interviewing system design at Facebook (i.e. 'Pirate' interviews). Are the questions and evaluation framework very similar within all of FANG and comparable companies? If not, how does it differ? • • • #fang #interviews #interviewing #design #systemdesign #pirates
Ya pubsub and queues, ETL, stream processing, by far. Data store selection. I think the key was to review all the concepts and exhaustively consider all topics. The #1 resource is System Design Primer tutorial on GitHub. And all the links and references. Such a wealth there.
Thank you very much, this is very helpful!
My team at Microsoft focuses on 2 system design rounds at least for senior + roles , for very junior more focus on algo and coding. Overall within system design what to chose would depend on what the team does - we rely on lot of distributed computing problems , hence our system design questions tend to be a mix of infra and services - and focus on availability scale and reliability in a highly distributed cloud environment.
Which team are you? Looking for a lateral move with focus on systems
Did your recruiter prep you for Your Facebook interview? Or give you preparation/study materials?
I went thru many on-sites and can confirm there is a wide range of variance in what you get. Google was like Facebook. Others were more particular problems within a system. Like, here is a high level system but modify it to support exactly-once, or order guarantees, etc. Others were to design some subsystem of a larger system. Yet others started with data modeling and then translate it to a system. 30 mins to 1 hr depending on company. I found my experience to be far more valuable than anything I read about in the books in prepping for this. Most common thing that came up was async event pipelines and at least once guarantees.
Interesting... Thanks for the insights! Did you notice any overarching themes? e.g. were most of them still heavy on distributed systems concepts? Do you have any tips on how to prepare for all the variety? :)