This goes back to "interviews go both ways". All those answers you gave are very reasonable and if I was your interviewer I'd pass you with flying colors. On the other hand if you're interviewing at a place that doesn't pass you with flying colors for those responses, that really says more about them than it does about you and may not be a great place to work.

But to your point, many times one interviews for a job they don't really have the luxury of getting rejections and need to land somewhere fast so they can keep paying the mortgage. So while yes interviewing is a two way street, there's still quite a bit of calibration to make sure you land on the other person's side of the street so to speak.

If I was your interviewer, I would: respect your answers a lot, not be able to check off anything on my rubric, try to explain this in the debrief, get told we have to stick to the rubric to counter bias, and then watch while they pass on you for someone who decided to play architecture jenga instead. I would potentially even consider emailing you to apologize later, then not do it because I'd probably get in trouble for exposing us to liability or something because apologizing can be construed as admission of guilt.

If I were the interviewer, I'd try to adjust the problem statement with some hypotheticals to tease out their depth of knowledge:

> "That's not really worth considering for this amount of QPS"

"What if Michael Jackson dies and your (search|news|celebrity gossip) service gets a spike in traffic way beyond the design parameters? How would you anticipate and mitigate such an event?"

(Extra points if the answer is not necessarily backpressure but they start talking about DDoS mitigation, outlier detection, caching or serving static results from extremely-common queries, spinning up new capacity to adjust to traffic spikes, blackholing traffic to protect the overall service, etc.)

> Interviewer: "Why wouldn't you use a queue here instead of a cron job?" "I don't think it's necessary for what this app is, but here's the tradeoffs."

"What if you have a subset of customers that demand faster responses than a cron job can provide?"

(And then that can become a discussion about splitting off traffic based on requirements, whether it's even worth adding the logic to split traffic vs. just using a queue for everyone, perhaps making direct API requests without either a queue or cron job for requests from just those customers, relying on the fact that they are not numerous or these requests are infrequent to trade capacity for latency, etc.)

> How would you choose between sql and nosql db?"

I would've expected the candidate to at least be able to talk about indexing, tradeoffs of joining in the DB vs. in the application, schema migrations and upgrades, creating separation between data-at-rest vs. data-in-flight, etc. If they can't do that and just handwave away as "whatever the team is most comfortable with", that's a legit hole in their knowledge. Usually you ask system design interviews of senior candidates that will be deciding on architecture and, if not hiring out the team directly, providing input to senior managers who will be hiring, so you can swap out the team nearly as easily as swapping out the architecture.

> that really says more about them than it does about you and may not be a great place to work.

If a really good "tech" engineer ruled out all the places that are bad at interviewing, they would probably be unemployed.

You have to look past bad interviewing practice, to some degree.

> there's still quite a bit of calibration to make sure you land on the other person's side of the street so to speak.

Exactly. But if they try to Leetcode you, you have to decide whether you have any self-respect at all, or you're all just playing house together.