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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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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Why invalid? They all see perfectly reasonable, though I would do them in a different order.
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Steelmanning the interview: because they want to know if you _are_ at the level of expert O (but that's probably being to generous to the interview process)
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3. is definitely underrated in many standard interviews. Understanding other people's code and seeing what the clever bits are is a skill that gets you quite far.
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