(throwaway account) Can’t comment on the AI angle of the post, but the system design question moaning is interesting. I did many years of hiring in a FAANG for

(throwaway account) Can’t comment on the AI angle of the post, but the system design question moaning is interesting. I did many years of hiring in a FAANG for senior/staff positions and “one simple trick” to break a candidate out of formulaic response like this is a simple “You can put an off-the-shelf product (Postgres, Redis, Cassandra, memcached, whatever) in your diagram here, but you would need to explain to me how it works in good detail. Is that OK?” Like, the author’s point #4 mentions shards and replicas — those are driven by a crazily complex software. Want to really test your candidate’s system design knowledge? Stop them as soon as they draw a “replica” rectangle and ask to explain the replication process. Otherwise they may as well just draw one rectangle saying “Magic” in it, really.