[greiskul]

In both FAANG jobs I had I was expected to design systems solo, and then review them with my team. If the system is complex enough, I would probably whiteboard it first with some teammates while I was designing it.

It is something that was asked of me in interviews, and comes up often in my day to day job. And being able to design systems, and to help review systems others are designing, is probably the single biggest impact thing I do regularly.

It is more useful in day to day than the algorithmic knowledge that was also asked of me during interviews. While there are people that do use complex algorithms in both companies, most software of Google is converting a protocol buffer into another protocol buffer, and in Amazon is the same thing but with JSON. If you are a frontend engineer, you might convert into HTML by plugging the values into a template engine.