Leetcode gets a lot hate but it seems System Design interviews are just as ridiculous sometimes. 1) you need to magically come up with the features and then negotiate with an interviewer what their interpretation of scale is. Gathering requirements is a real skill, but schmoozing your way to get an interview to share the problem theyâve remembered in their head is something else. 2) capacity calculations, even the way google SRE interviews do it, are complete nonsense. You have to run performance tests to actually know if you can scale. Btw Jeff deans numbers are outdated, so if they are so important why hasnât anybody updated them? 3) real systems have so many edge cases and dirty scenarios that take a lot of care to design around. That actually takes more design skill than pulling out cookbook solutions to cookie cutter imaginary âscale problemsâ yet we focus so much on the latter 4) these systems took a decade to design with thousands of engineers collaboratively, but you only get 45 minutes. And despite the time constraint, they wonât even tell you the right problem to solve. If you want to see if someone can design something, give them time to think through everything and then present those decisions just like we can at work. 5) there are no right answers but in reality there is. You need to solve the problem the interviewer is ready to comment on. But you have to pull that out of them too. 6) the interview is supposed to be a critical thinking interview, but is currently implemented as a knowledge interview. There arenât many people who have real experience with scaling distributed systems. Even senior engineers and tech leads at faang only get to solve a tiny slice of a flagship system like Dropbox. They can only test your design based on the designs they copied from someone else. 7) Everyone asks the same questions because they probably learned from the same materials everyone else uses. If you have specialized knowledge, it will just over the head of the interviewer. For example they are testing you on GFS design, but you worked on CEPH, so you can describe something entirely different from what they expect. System design interviewers are more relevant than leetcode so itâs a step in the right direction, but itâs been twisted to have the same failings leetcode did. There are good interviewers out there for system design no doubt, but there can only be so many engineers who are actually qualified to openly discuss designs in depth instead of the acting I see today. And given the flaws above here is my advice for system design: 1) Ask A LOT of questions about what needs to be designed and covered. Try your best to get the interviewer to share what they actually want to talk about. You must answer to right question to get the âright answerâ 2) Be super organized and empathetic to the interviewers to get those hints. If your pictures look like chicken scratch, then they wonât follow and will be less inclined to work collaboratively with you 3) read through all the common resources and then dig deeper to where theyâve hand waved too much or might even be wrong. You only need to go 1 level deeper than the average person to give a better signal than your competition. Ie, read ddia cover to cover more than onceâs 4) if you get an interviewer who is a memorizer, try your best to steer the interview into an open conversation. Show some vulnerability by explaining your reasons, where youâre stuck, what youâre concerned about, how youâre structuring your ideas. Just my thoughts, feel free to rage at me now đđ
No, if you have experience building complex and challenging products /systems design interviews are really walk in the park. It's coding interviews that are broken where regardless of how complex problems you solved by coding well you still need to grind the LC to pass the interview.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
Donât think too much about logic. Treat it like a game. It says nothing about your technical skills. As you said, it doesnât test critical thinking, more like memorization. Thatâs how I think about it at least. I completely desensitize around tech interviews.
100% agree. With no formal CS education, zero relevant on-the-job experience, and zero prior knowledge of what âsystem designâ even meant, I crammed for just four weeks and passed Meta E4 and Amazon SDE2 system design rounds. My study plan consisted of Grokking SDI, a few YouTube videos, and 10ish paid mock interviews. Best $2k I ever spent.
Interviewers who have actually designed systems can easily spot the clueless memorizers.
Everything is broken because it totally depends on that one person who is interviewing you that day
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Metamate- cringe max posts by this wannabe influencer
How many yoe do you have?
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