Deep Dive Into System Design

For senior hiring, both code test and system design are required.

(PS: How to prepare code test: here)

Now let’s think how to prepare for system design interviews!

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What For?

Examine relevancy: Does the candidate have relevant working experience? Especially for critical problems in my projects.
Examine potential: How deep the candidate understand about the concepts in our domains, and also the painpoints.
Examine skills: Is he/she able to bring up a qualified architecture design with given constraints by discussing together.

It’s hard to fake it, if you don’t have enough hands-on experience.

Not For!

It’s not about the final architecture design. It’s about your thinking process. It’s about your assumptions and judgments.

Your thinking process indicates:
1. Working with unknown: How you can breakdown/convert complex problems into small/easy ones
2. Relevancy in the domain: How deep your experience
3. Your communication skills. How good you can convince others

Your assumptions and judgments indicate:
1. how you would do better trade-off which fits into the project
2. How you can simplify the problems.

It’s not about accuracy, but about relevancy. You can make any assumptions. But then try to make reasonable estimations afterwards.
No one expect you to be a super man/woman. But remember to show your expertises and strengths. And how they can benefit the team.
Everything is a trade-off. After getting familiar with best practices, most likely you will see no silver bullets when you design solutions.
Avoid feeling frustrated, if your interview doesn’t go well. Even for the same question, different interviewers can make the interview totally different. Take it easy.