I’ve got an on-site coming up with Square where I was told I’ll be asked to design a hotel booking system for the design portion. From what I’ve seen, this is a standard question of theirs that they ask most candidate. Does anyone have recommendations on resources they found helpful to prep for this?
Wth. They told you what they are going to ask??
Yep. Their interview process has been super transparent so far. They even have a blog post about how they conduct coding interviews. I’m sure they will have follow-ups and twists to throw in to see how you react to new constraints and change your design even if you study a bunch and come with one rehearsed
Yes, everyone gets the same question. Helps ensure everyone is on equal ground.
Good that square told you the question. Nobody perfectly designed netflix or uber in 30 mins. Nor was dynamic programming done in 45 mins
Maybe not at intuit. At goog and meta engineers solve np hard problems in polynomial time every morning while sipping coffee.
Ideally you know a bit about everything, can go deep into something, and can explain why you made the choice you made. We're not expecting you to be an expert in everything. DDIA is over-prepping. Grokking system design is good. It'll show if you've memorized an answer and we ask how you'd change the design to deal with a change in requirements.
I’ve been using grokking system design and found that helpful. Good to know you found it useful as well. What is DDIA?
'Designing Data Intensive Applications' - a must read if you're a back end engineer but it's a large book that's information dense.
If you over-prepare you will likely fail this interview. Go in expecting to be challenged, we do this interview with high frequency and can easily sniff out when someone has come in with a pre-determined plan and without intent to listen to new constraints. Start small, make choices early that allow you to extend your architecture depending on the new problems we add.
Hey thanks for the inputs, I had one question, is the question to design something like booking.com or for a single hotel ?
Re-read my comment.
What? I have interview this week and they did not tell me anything
They would have sent you a prep doc that has it mentioned
https://tinyurl.com/2p8s8n9y
Or Alex Xu's second book...