In practice I can't imagine the spirit of any law would be violated by doing an architecture diagram, but it seems likely (to me, at least) the word of the law would be violated.
His interviews are humorous. Those leading the interviews can't tell him what he'll be working on, and he can't tell them what he's done in the past.
The questions tend to be very theoretical, instead.
(Don't kill me, you all. I'm joking).
Sure, every company is going to have their 'special sauce' components, that ARE proprietary, but nobody's going to expect you to unpack those.
He worked for their competitor, but not in the capacity the interviewer was trying to delve into, so in addition to scummy, it was pointless and annoying.
At some point my friend cut the interview off.
In theory yes, in practice ... if that's true, why would anyone ever hire you for your experience? You wouldn't be allowed to use it.
But isn't that exactly why you as an interviewer would pose a problem, set up the context that is potentially similar to the work your project would require, and see how the interviewee navigates that?
And I sure would hope they bring all their experience to bear! Just because they learned about CDNs at their previous job and “everything is proprietary”, I don’t want them to suddenly forget how CDNs work.
Very little is actually unique between software businesses. We’re mostly just doing data bureaucracy.
There is term called prior art an for me if you write bunch of props to database like text/numbers it is basically done in every other system.
Unless you build novel db system of course.
Maybe we're just on different wavelengths, but literally every single thing I work on that would be a good candidate for this sort of interview is extremely proprietary...and I'm just working on regular ol' backend services at [generic big tech].
You wouldn't be able to build anything, as all your knowledge is NDAed!
If I were asked a question like this I’d wonder if I were being tested to see how loose-lipped I am with sensitive information.
Proprietary systems are company IP. Talking about the design of the system is protected by the NDA, which the exercise described above is asking the candidate to do.
You hire for the skills to develop your own proprietary system. The employer doesn't own the skill. The employer owns anything those skills produced for the employer.
You wouldn't want your employees giving the recipe to your secret sauce away to your competitor, right? That's what everyone is talking about.
They can have used their skills to come up with a recipe that tastes the same because the requirements led to that outcome, or they simply copied your recipe.
If somebody from OpenAI goes to a competitor and creates something like ChatGPT, where is the line crossed that shows that company IP is transferred? The employee knows how to create the system because he knows how ChatGPT works. If he recreates a similar system but doesn't say that it is a copy of ChatGPT, is that applied skill or is that a violation of the NDA?
If it is a violation, how could he forget the structure of ChatGPT to genuinely come up with a new structure?
Oh OK! Then I guess a good engineer should be able to make it through a standard systems design interview process, and shouldn't complain about it!
I am glad you agree that it is totally fine to ask engineers these types of questions, and there is no problems with NDAs that will get in the way of them demonstrating basic skills!
That was my point entirely.
Yes, I totally agree that an engineer should be able to go through a tech interview.
And the engineers who are complaining about the fact that they have an NDA are wrong, and they should stop complaining.
If the NDA is so significant that it prevents you from doing an interview, then you are worthless as an employee anyway. But really that should never happen.
[Client]->[Cloudfront]->[Load balancer]->[ECS service in a VPC]->[RDS/other internal systems]
* Replace the above with any other cloud provider, or just commercial/open source tools that do the same job running in a VPS or whatever *
I can't see how any of this could be claimed to be protected by an NDA or similar, as this is just a highly standard architecture.
If you work on a proprietary system that has a specific architecture just don't mention that of course. I think the above allows us to discuss things pretty well, talk about introducing caching, why each layer is there, TLS termination, authentication/authorization concerns and implementation, secrets management...
The first is generic (unless you happen to be a current Twitter employee). No NDA impact. The second is asking you to reveal details of a proprietary system covered by NDA (or if you’re a Fed contractor, covered by various classification laws).
Sure, folks will ask you to drill down here and there for more detailed info, but if someone pokes on something where the details really _ARE_ proprietary, it's fine to just say that and offer to drill down somewhere else.