News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A Senior Engineer's Guide to the System Design Interview by okdood64 on Friday March 03, 2023 @01:12AM (#35006397)
> I just didn't know how you're supposed to approach the question.

For your example, I would ask them to define what scale we were operating in, and what the footprint would be, etc.

Then you could start off with a more complex design (which seems like what the interviewer wanted.)

Re:A Senior Engineer's Guide to the System Design Interview by emodendroket on Friday March 03, 2023 @02:48AM (#35006914)
Well I know that now because I watched a bunch of prep videos and then easily passed interviews despite my experience not significantly changing in the intervening time. But that's my point; if you don't prep you have to just guess which aspects of this pretend scenario you're meant to be taking seriously and which are OK to gloss over. I had other interviews go off the rails because I offered too much detail about a smaller part of the system and discussion of it dominated the entire time but even though the interview kept engaging this discussion it wasn't actually what they wanted. "Don't bother prepping because you can't; it's just measuring your real abilities" is just not right, in my opinion.