Hey Blind! I have an interview at Square coming up and have gotten some details about the system design interview. I'm wondering if it's more 1) general system design focused discussing caching, load balancing, etc OR if it's more 2) OOP oriented Just trying to figure out what I should brush up on pre-interview.# #square
Which team are you interviewing for? And YoE?
5 yoe and applied to general open swe post. Haven't team match yet.
Honestly, it's whatever you want it to be. Spend 40 minutes telling us something interesting same how you'd build it. It's usually the standard data schema and system architecture, but some people talk about frontend, some about predictive pricing, some about very specific technologies, etc.
what are the expectations like for someone with 2 YOE?
Not much. We don't expect much from L4 candidates. Don't actively be a jerk, have a good attitude, admit when you don't know things and tell us when you do, be open to asking for help.
Hotel Booking System is the question they ask. It's the standard for everyone. They look for your distributed system design skills and how well you make the system HA and scalable. But be sure not to reach the optimal solution quickly, instead try to discuss with them and take their opinions even if you think you have better ways to do it.
I got stuck at dealing with how to model the room data, ie reservations for specific dates. Do you just keep an array for all the dates that this specific room is unavailable for? I failed my system design, I know it, and it’s killing me
For available dates, you go for SQL DB and and create an "Available Table" with HotelID, RoomTypeID, Date, AvailableQty as columns. Discuss with the interviewer that your system won't support bookings that are beyond x days in future.