| > To me, this heavily biases towards engineers that have already built or at least designed a similar system to the one you're presenting them. Yes, this is not an IQ test, we are trying to see how people react to problems in our domain not measure some generalized form of reasoning. The advantage of picking a problem as close to our real problems as possible is that I don't have to worry how they generalize from the interview to work. In general, my experience with system design interviews is that people make bad designs, and when you drill down on them they give bad rationales. Similar to coding screens, people just out themselves as not very good at their jobs regularly. > Those are interesting challenges, and if the interview is an experienced developer, I don't think a candidate could really bullshit through them to a significant degree. It's not really about "bullshit" per se, but about whether their understanding of their context is correct or not. They can tell you fully reasonable sounding things that are just wrong. In a mock interview, you can see if they ask good questions about their context. > I personally wouldn't care if the ideas originated with the candidate vs. another member of the team. I'd be looking for how well the candidate understood the problem and the solution they implemented, the other solutions considered, the tradeoffs, etc. I totally disagree with this. It is very different to be able to remember the design doc for the project and parrot the things that were talked about vs actually writing it. If I want to hire someone who can design things well from scratch and I get someone who makes bad decisions unless someone is supervising them, I will be very disappointed. In general, I have given both interviews to the same candidate and after saying a bunch of reasonable things about their existing work, when I ask them how to do design something I quickly find that they are less impressive than they seem. Again, maybe I'm bad at giving experiential interviews, but being hard to administer is a point against them. My experience of hiring is also that I am generally not looking to take chances, unwinding bad hires is super painful. |