Why do we expect candidates to come up with an ideal solution in 45 for some system that was designed over the course of years if not decades? Examples: Design Twitter Design Yelp Design TicketMaster Let's be honest, nobody is ever responsible for such a vast system. A real system Design would be for one service and would take at least a week to nail the design down.
Over population. Why hire you when people are giving up on outside interaction in order to land unpaid internships.
I know. That's why you're at Google and I'm where I'm at.
They don’t want the actual ideal design. Heck is there an ideal design? Probably not. What they want is to see you demonstrate that you’ve got some experience designing systems. Or at least that you’ve paid attention to other people’s designs. Basically just follow the playbook in that Alex Xu book. And whenever there’s an opportunity to talk about the pros and cons of a specific choice, bring that up. Same thing for if you can mention how a specific section of the system will scale with users or more data etc. Basically just do what you’re supposed to do in university exams when you don’t fully have an answer to a physics problem. Vomit all the knowledge you have into the interview. It won’t be an ideal solution, but they’re looking to hire you, not your solution. Also it’s tough out there now. You could be doing amazing in interview and not get called back. They have the advantage right now unfortunately. Good luck!
I agree with everything you said, but that's my point. Leetcode has always been about vomiting pattern recognition. System Design is now all about vomiting knowledge about all the random tools you know... So little of the actual job has to do with either of these. But whatever, we study and exercise our interviewing skills to chase that TC
Oh I absolutely agree. It’s dogshit. It has nothing to do with the actual job, especially the programming questions. I’ve been working in this industry for 8 years and you still want me to solve riddles to get hired? Riddles that have nothing to do with my actual job? It’s complete bullshit. I hate it and it needs to change.
System design nowadays is just like leetcode, you needs lots of practice in order to hit everything in the interview.
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Sorry your "ideal" assumption is not right
You design all your production services in 45min with generic requirements?
No one is expecting a production services in 45 minutes. they want to understand your technical expertise.