jwang14

Hard to argue Waymo hasn't gone anywhere, given their public pilots.

The other one I know of is Wing partnering with Doordash in AUS: https://help.doordash.com/consumers/s/article/Drone-Delivery...

I thought about this myself as I went through this exact course. For context I had been exposed to and even implemented some of the concepts (like db sharding) at work but much of it was still new to me.

An ideal interview should reflect the actual work you'll do during the job. And I think system design interviews accomplish that job pretty well (certainly much better than coding interviews). Will you ever have to design and build a system like you during the interview? Likely not - a startup, while does require building a lot things for scratch, rarely requires the scalability and intricacy outlined in these interviews. While large companies will have the components broken up by team, so you'll often be silo'd into just one part.

That said, knowing how your systems work at a high-level is much more useful than knowing something like shortest-path algorithms. Even if you are silo'd, understanding upstream/downstream interactions can be crucial.