System design interviews when you've never built a distributed system
System design interviews stress me out a lot because I'm basically faking them. I don't mind the ones that are more like google doc tech spec designs because I actually do those at work (e.g how would you design the "someone is typing" feature for slack). But the questions about how I'd design youtube or twitter or something and handle millions of users - I've never had to do anything remotely like that in my career Obviously I'm studying a lot, but is the spirit of these interview rounds to find people who actually have done real work at this level? Or is it possible to pass for a senior-level role with only theoretical ability? Like for example, in all these distributed system design interviews you almost always have to mention message queues etc. My company's entire app is a monolith running a couple dozen instances on AWS. Sure I can talk about kafka to some degree but if my interviewer wanted to grill me on it it's obvious I've never actually built a real system with it I'm asking because I'm spending time preparing for these senior level system design interviews, and I'm wondering if I'm better off just considering them a lost cause and instead going all-in on the coding rounds so I can lock in some downleveled mid-level offers If it matters, specifically asking about interviews at places like FAANG (no design round at google for me tho), Coinbase, Twitter, Dropbox, Github TC: 200k YOE: 5 #interview #systemdesign #prep
You can probably get into a senior level but you won’t be able to make staff or principle if you’ve never built something that has scaled. It’s important to know the concepts and how they work more than the fine detail, you can google how to shard a database but if you have no idea how or when you should shard and the trade offs then you’d have no concept of it when designing the system and that could be an issue
Agreed…
Don't listen to such bs
Very good question, I am in the same boat!
At FAANG it’s unlikely to get senior (though not impossible and apple may be an exception). You possibly could if you have really strong experience in some other specialization (distributed systems is a specialization).
Yeah, at FAANG, you could probably get L3/L4 with a bad system design interview performance, but not L5+.
How many people actually designed Twitter or YouTube? Very rare. So system design interview is not about your experience but how you will build the system with your knowledge.
Here is a principal @ Amazon talking about it https://youtu.be/0Z9RW_hhUT4
Nice videos
Its all luck..its very difficult to predict…what if you prepared for a web crawler and they asked you a web crawler….you still dont have design experience but your interview performance would be stellar…so its all luck…I would just prepare and not worry about result