How do you approach a design question when tasked with dealing with millions of users

Cisco
acidbase

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acidbase
May 2, 2019 17 Comments

Just curious if you don’t have so much experience dealing with large scale data in day to day life and design interviews revolve around them


Addendum:

Is it valid to ask “design data science X algorithm application on large scale” with validation and feature selection?

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  • Yelp / Eng
    sJJv80

    Go to company page Yelp Eng

     sJJv80
    Start watching some of the system design videos on YouTube. You can also read things like the High Scalability blog.

    Ultimately, a lot of these questions end up having a lot of caching and sometimes denormalization involved, so I’d look into topics like that, too. One good example here is how to serve the Twitter home feed. The actual answer, as in what Twitter literally does, is precalcualate it and stuff it all in memcache.
    May 2, 2019 5
  • Google
    policies

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    policies
    From personal experience, this is something that only work can teach you.
    May 2, 2019 4
    • Yelp / Eng
      sJJv80

      Go to company page Yelp Eng

       sJJv80
      I straight up tell people what experience I have with designing systems. I’ve never designed the Twitter home feed, but that didn’t stop some random 70 person startup from asking me to.
      May 2, 2019
    • Google
      policies

      Go to company page Google

      policies
      That way one hasn't designed a lot of systems. But design can be similar/can have reusable components of the across different problems. Problem with reading the solution like leetcode is that they don't always talk about major problems that can still occur or certain things that still can be done with certain infrastructure. Eg: even things like bigtable and Cassandra have bottlenecks in certain use cases (in offline mode), which people never talk about. An experienced interviewer might ask you about that.
      May 3, 2019
  • Sharding
    May 2, 2019 3
  • Cisco
    acidbase

    Go to company page Cisco

    acidbase
    OP
    Is it valid to ask “design data science X algorithm application on large scale” with validation and feature selection?
    May 2, 2019 0
  • Amazon
    badonka

    Go to company page Amazon

    badonka
    That’s fine. It only comes with experience on that. You’d probably get demoted. No biggie.
    May 2, 2019 0