System Design Interview budget constraints
I see sample system design interviews and I'm appalled by the lack of regards to resource planning that the supposed "solutions" give.
"Just shard these jobs across 500 machines then replicate them and put them behind a reverse proxy and several layers of caches to provide reliability and lower latency to users on multiple geographical regions bla bla bla". These kinds of answers are very detached from reality where managers actually need to fight for resources annually/quarterly just to get CPU, storage, and even headcount to develop all of these. Not to mention the number of SRE/production engineers you have to pay just to give these two 9's of reliability in all time zones.
I even hear some bullshit about storing data in Spanner / Bigtable or some other paper they read in VLDB. Yeah good luck with that because that's another set of engineers and SRE's that you have to pay just to make your system work.
So I guess my question is: Is there a limit on how candidates can get crazy with their system design?
#systemdesign #interview
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comments
The main point is the adoption of cloud technologies requires a 5-10 year roadmap as the F500 companies barely hire enough developers to handle normal operations. I would love to work somewhere that keeps up with current trends (e.g. doesn’t have 15 year-old legacy apps that nobody is maintaining).
This can be served as your limit. Do not leave your candidate clueless as your interviewer should be more experienced than the candidate.