I'm starting to wonder if design interviews are not only useless, but actually contributors to poor design. I'm still thinking through this, by my reasoning for this is:
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For my most recent design interview my answers to "how would you scale M up to limit A?" were, in descending order of preference (the interviewers thankfully didn't fail me for this): 1. Buy a solution from N that's known to scale up to 100x A
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2. Talk to expert O, who has solved this problem before, ask for other experts to talk to and see what they have to say 3. Read the relevant bits on LWN and LKML, understand how the open source implementation of M by company P works 4. Run experiments, profile, read code, etc.
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5. The usual design interview nonsense, boxes and arrows, Fermi estimates, say "pubsub" a few times, etc. The interviewers very patiently explained to me that solutions 1-4 were invalid and kindly didn't fail me for those (I think most would've), but what's the point of this?
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I see a lot of systems that look like they were designed by skipping straight to step (5). Of course I can't prove a causal link from design interviews, but it seems plausible that design interviews train people to design real systems without understanding the problem domain.
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People say these interviews "measure how you think", but
@hillelogram has looked into the history for other kinds of interview questions, he found "how you think" was a post hoc rationalization for questions that were originally asked for other reasons. Likely same here.Show this thread -
But even without looking at the historical record, "how you think" seems bogus To answer a Fermi estimation question, you just need to know how to play the Fermi estimation game. Make up numbers, multiply them together, and then you pass. Basically ditto for design interviews.pic.twitter.com/zoOU85g5ac
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End of conversation
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I think this is where I disagree with your argument. For me, a good design process (and a good design interview) is first an exploration of constraints. It’s also an attempt to probe what domain knowledge the interviewee has. Where are they deep? What should we go into?
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Primarily, in interviewing for senior engineering roles, I’m looking for somebody who can ask the right questions, probe assumptions, and make data-driven design decisions. Simplifying is great! But interviews are, by necessity, synthetic.
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