I’m getting ready to interview and reading up on systems design interviews. Have Designing Data Intensive Applications and Systems Interview books and read through grokking and systems design primer on github. Practicing the interviews now and wondering to those who interview new candidates for SDE2: are back of the envelope calculations a need-to-do? Or can I just talk about how I would scale things? Stuff like using queries per second to determine number of servers, etc. I’ll throw a poll in here but interested in some replies, thanks! TC: 95k 4 YOE #interviews #systemdesign
I’ll never understand why interviewers would judge you on ability to memorize anything math-related.
I know right? I would prefer an open discussion and a cordial back-and-forth, but I'm just going off online resources here which say otherwise.
Wow this is a tight race 50/50. Interesting...for those saying YES it would be cool if you shared level and company
I have done 100s of systems design interview and I don't even spend time on it and don't ask my candidates. I think it is waste of 5-10min of time from a limited 45min interview time that I have and I would rather spend it on evaluating candidate for different concepts, design decisions and tradeoffs.
I say yes, because some big places literally have a checkbox on the interviewer form about whether or not candidates used math to calculate something. Not saying it’s right but that’s the way it is. (And many small places copy what the big places do...) Frankly I think it’s overemphasized in all the study material except DDIA, probably for this reason. But it’s worth taking 20 seconds to multiply a few bytes together.
Since I can’t do math. Can I write down the equation and use a calculator to come up with a result? For example: 1 million messages posted per day: 1,000,000 / 24 / 3600 = 11.5 wps
I’m assuming that if it’s a virtual on-site, you can probably screen capture a calculator on your desktop. That’d be really annoying otherwise :(
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I honestly don't understand why they would be. Everything they ask you to design is huge and needs to be scaled for a large audience.
That makes sense. It takes a lot of requests per second before you hit the need to scale, and when you get that many, I assume you're seeing consistent growth. I don't work in distributed systems anywhere near that scale so I have no idea.