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I have designed large scale systems, but I often feel most of my system design interviewers haven’t and are much more pedantic/nitpicky than is reasonable. Leet

I have designed large scale systems, but I often feel most of my system design interviewers haven’t and are much more pedantic/nitpicky than is reasonable. Leetcode is better because most people at least understand the questions they’re asking. Last time I did a system design interview I mentioned database triggers as a way to maintain some kind of data invariant, which flustered my interviewer and I guess made it so their canned follow up questions didn’t work, so they asked if I could think of any other approach (the one they had in mind). I couldn’t and it made the interview very painful.

dumpster_fire 3y ago
You just reminded me of the time I was explaining how to do consensus failover, and the interviewer asked me to do distributed single thread design. Great use of everyone's time. The market is full of LARPers who wish they had the chance to design something real, and they will take it out on you.
danielvaughn 3y ago
This is a good example of a bad interviewer. Never have a specific concrete answer in mind when asking an open-ended question.
- kagevf 3y ago
  Or, if you want the candidate to talk about a certain approach, maybe think of some ways you can nudge them in that direction. If something's not at top of mind, some subtle hints from the interviewer could trigger a discussion of what they want to talk about. The interviewer shouldn't be tied to a "script".
- dekhn 3y ago
  For the really good candidates (IE, ones who can answer basic programming questions and explain how a hash table works), I have an open-ended question which is really an open question in an active field. I really hoped I'd get candidates who would get that far (https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2975 https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2975) so that I could finally get some interesting answers I haven't heard before but most candidates I end up interviewing struggle to explain a hash table and what its advantages/disadvantages for counting unique k-mers are.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I was once interviewing someone who came up with a design I didn’t understand and he walked me through it on the board. He was an immediate hire. I learned a lot from him and asked him for advice when I had an architectural decision to make at my next job even though we didn’t work together.

dumpster_fire 3y ago

You just reminded me of the time I was explaining how to do consensus failover, and the interviewer asked me to do distributed single thread design. Great use of everyone's time. The market is full of LARPers who wish they had the chance to design something real, and they will take it out on you.

danielvaughn 3y ago

This is a good example of a bad interviewer. Never have a specific concrete answer in mind when asking an open-ended question.

kagevf 3y ago
Or, if you want the candidate to talk about a certain approach, maybe think of some ways you can nudge them in that direction. If something's not at top of mind, some subtle hints from the interviewer could trigger a discussion of what they want to talk about. The interviewer shouldn't be tied to a "script".
dekhn 3y ago
For the really good candidates (IE, ones who can answer basic programming questions and explain how a hash table works), I have an open-ended question which is really an open question in an active field. I really hoped I'd get candidates who would get that far (https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2975 https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2975) so that I could finally get some interesting answers I haven't heard before but most candidates I end up interviewing struggle to explain a hash table and what its advantages/disadvantages for counting unique k-mers are.
scarface_74 3y ago
I was once interviewing someone who came up with a design I didn’t understand and he walked me through it on the board. He was an immediate hire. I learned a lot from him and asked him for advice when I had an architectural decision to make at my next job even though we didn’t work together.