There’s no place where we are asking you to diagram the system that you’re working on. We ask you to diagram a system you understand well. Are you using messages queues, container orchestration, network components, cloud infrastructure, Java/rust/go/Python/etc.? Tell me about one of those components and how they connect together in theory vs the specifics of your system. Everyone who works in technology works with, mostly, complicated interconnected systems. The point of this exercise isn’t to design a system or tell me about a system that you’ve designed as much as it is about helping the team to understand the breadth and depth of your technology knowledge. Good engineers typically find creative ways help us understand their knowledge without disclosing NDA material.

You live in a world where most of those systems you describe are not covered by NDA. Not everyone does.

I worked at apple in the past. It would be a violation to answer your questions.

You can’t tell me how HTTPS works because of your NDA?

I feel like I'm either losing my mind or people are being deliberately obtuse now.

He's not saying they ask you to give a full overview of the way Apple architects their systems, he's saying they ask you to explain how a basic Kubernetes deployment might look, or how you might go about setting up some kind of backup system, or literally any of a million different technical things that you might have knowledge of and interest in.

How could things like this possibly be under NDA? If you weren't able to use any of this knowledge, you would be completely crippled in your work.

Exactly, I work in consulting and under a blanket NDA for all work I do. In addition clients often put us under theirs as well. The other poster doesn't seem to have much experience with NDAs and seems to think the 'secret parts' are made explicit, they are not.

But, if you’re a web developer you should be able to diagram what happens when a browser makes a request

Ok yes because that’s colleges level material. The subject here is Staff Engineer (L6) interviewing. So that will require nearly all the demonstration of value to be of high level professional context.

But there’s lots of systems like this that you could diagram with arbitrary levels of detail without talking about NDAed systems

Nobody forced those people into that situation.

There's a lot of nobody in the context of interviewers making it expressly harder for those people to stop being that situation.