I am curious about how interviewers evaluate candidate's performance in system design interviews. What do you typically look for? And how do you quantify it?
Hey. I was bar raiser at amazon and now at oracle mostly asking system design questions. Here is what I'm looking for by order of priority. 1/ do you gather the requirements (liveliness and safetiness properties of the system for example) ; are you customer centric in your approches; do you ask why and dive deep in each requirements 2/ do you define the right limits of the system (what the system can't do); do you realize the trade-offs. 3/ Do you think big enough to have the right level of abstraction but keep it simple. 4/ do you have basic knowledge (avoid single point of failure, replication, cap theorem, throttling, security, horizontal scaling, availability and delivery semantics, fault tolerant, consistent hashing etc..) 5/ can you think clearly, do you have a good working method, can you divide and conquer. Do you loop back on requirements to test if your design work well. Do you call out how the system can and can't evolve. 6/ do you have domain expertise / fancy knowledge (micro services, technologies, cloud, distributed algorithms, tla+, read scientific papers...)
If their current employer has been in the news for major f'ck ups 🤣
if you can trade off