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renewiltord 5 days ago

You can always say “Since we’ve got only x QPS, I’m going to do A. If we had say y QPS, I’d do B but that would impact the rest of the design. Let me know if you anticipate growth to y and I can show you how I’d do it”

The point of an interview is to lay bare one’s thought process entirely so that the interviewer has full awareness of the person you are. And to likewise extract that from the interviewer. Getting or transmitting less information is just underutilizing the time. Interviewers are also flawed and may not be good enough at extracting the information from you.

If you’re an ideal decision maker, you will likely out-skill the majority of interviewers. You’re being hired to make their org succeed. So just do that.

I think people who describe system designs frequently fail to demarcate the space they’re operating in, so subsequent engineers cannot determine whether the original designer failed to consider something or whether the original designer considered and dismissed something. The point is to be able to express this concisely.

IMHO, doing it well means that not only do you get it right but you send the information down through time so that subsequent observers understand why and also get it right consequently.