A senior interviewer's guide to the system design interview*.
I've speed read over the existing two sections and while it's informative, I'd argue that the maybe 10+/12 of the core design concepts are things that someone with a formal CS education should have picked up - you don't need to be a senior software engineer.
The barrier is knowing how these things can be pieced together to make a system from scratch which is the more difficult part as it is a much rarer occurrence in most people's experiences. Even seniors may not have much experience in setting up large scale systems (depending on your definition of senior), so at the end of the day anyone that studied or memorized the material is good enough to pass - practical experience or not.
I'd much rather have a high level view of an existing or theoretical system, be provided with some issue that occurs, and be asked for ways to diagnose and remediate said issue. Forget the dance around setting the system up. This is similar to the practice of providing existing code in an interview, describing a bug with the code, and watching the interviewee debug and fix it - but with systems. It mirrors actual work more closely.
I've speed read over the existing two sections and while it's informative, I'd argue that the maybe 10+/12 of the core design concepts are things that someone with a formal CS education should have picked up - you don't need to be a senior software engineer.
The barrier is knowing how these things can be pieced together to make a system from scratch which is the more difficult part as it is a much rarer occurrence in most people's experiences. Even seniors may not have much experience in setting up large scale systems (depending on your definition of senior), so at the end of the day anyone that studied or memorized the material is good enough to pass - practical experience or not.
I'd much rather have a high level view of an existing or theoretical system, be provided with some issue that occurs, and be asked for ways to diagnose and remediate said issue. Forget the dance around setting the system up. This is similar to the practice of providing existing code in an interview, describing a bug with the code, and watching the interviewee debug and fix it - but with systems. It mirrors actual work more closely.