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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There've been times where I've reduced the implementation effort of something by 100x to 1000x, producing in 1 day something that replaced ~1 year of work (proposed or actual). This has never been with "design interview" reasoning, it's always been domain knowledge.
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This doesn't mean you have to be a deep domain expert, in the two most extreme cases, it was something I came to pretty soon after starting work in a new (to me) field. But it was still after much more time than you get in a design interview.
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Interviewers sometimes try to get around this by saying you should questions assumptions, etc., but I don't think this would have worked in either case. In one case, the solution resolved something that had been an open problem in IR for decades, that's not interview material.
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In the other case, the solution was to relax an unnecessary constraint. I think it would've been v. difficult to successfully challenge such a fundamental assumption in an interview, it's probably faster to just build the thing (which is what I did), but not feasible in interview
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Replying to @danluu
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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Replying to @MarcJBrooker @danluu
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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I don't disagree in principle, maybe my problem with this is that I haven't seen a design interview I think is really useful. But (if I'm not overly pessimistic about the ones I've seen) I think that's at least a sign that they're very hard to do well.
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