Have onsite coming up. What’s the diff between product architecture and distributed system design interview? Recruiter is asking which I I want to choose? Any advice is appreciated! Tc 160 Yoe 4
Which one are you more comfortable with? Pick that :-) difficulty is the same. Of you have experience with distributed system pick that, otherwise pick the other one.
News feed?
Anyone from Fb can provide examples?
examples of system design and product design?
Have you seen Facebook’s design? I wouldn’t expect much!
Design FB messenger Design Type Ahead
Prepare here - https://www.interviewbit.com/courses/system-design/
System design expects to go deeper into how things work and scale, so storage, backend focus is what is going on. For product architecture its more general, and typically involves API design kind of problem. It has scale issue baked in but mostly from just design of that API. You are usually allowed to make a LOT more assumptions with product design one. Theory is that product engineers do better with product architecture and infra engs do better with system design. For some engineers therefore one will be clearly easier than the other in no particular order.
For product design: Design of standard REST APIs with best practices that meets the objective? That’s sounds pretty simple. What about websocket? Caching at diff levels? Database sharding... etc. do we need to calculate the amount of database or type of database we need?
Its not about how well you know REST but logically what you will haul over in both directions and think of product type “scaling” like supporting capabilities and realizing when the API wont be easy to use if volumes of certain things are too high. Indirectly you can think about qps and excessiveness. Think major endpoints. Cache, storage wont really come up much but you can sometimes find a way to plug. Again, prod design is a bit more logical, integration style problem. Sys design is more about standing something up with focus on backend whatever it means
When I interviewed at Facebook, all three times, the other managers made it clear that design decisions are developed driven. And I think the state of the video player, privacy management and other features support that idea. Just an observation.
“There are two types of design interviews: systems design and product design”