[fritzo]

What was your answer to the hiring manager? How about:

"[buzzword] systems need lots of training data. To process that data quickly, systems must parallelize and distribute computation. Concurrent queues are a basic building block in parallel and distributed systems. They are used both internally in [buzzword] systems and directly by engineers building ingest pipelines and serving systems. Engineers need to know the trade-offs of different concurrent queue implementations to avoid introducing unnecessary bottlenecks in [buzzword] systems."