Are System Design Interviews Flawed?

NeetCodeIO · Intermediate ·🏗️ Systems Design & Architecture ·2y ago

Key Takeaways

The video discusses the flaws in system design interviews, highlighting the difference between theoretical system design and real-world implementation, and emphasizes the importance of understanding the details and nuances of system design.

Full Transcript

are DSA rounds getting replaced with system design rounds what's your thought as far as I know I don't know any companies where that is the case there's always going to be some type of coding round whether it's DSA or something else because at the lower level positions that's primarily your job anyway doing a lot of coding system design is very vague you have boxes and you have servers talking to databases you know you can draw a box and say I'm adding a load balancer who I said the key word I said the two words the magic word load balancer now that's going to automatically scale my application it's very shallow it's what I don't like about system design in a real system design interview it's not about putting the boxes in the correct place because it's really a template the best example that I could give with this and I'm not even trying to plug at this point I made a course and I made a design dock which is free I'm genuinely not trying to plug a short design dock right you're trying to solve a problem right like design YouTube I focused on a pretty specific part of it video processing part in Theory this design should work right it's just very basic you transcode a video and then you consume a video there's missing parts to this there's no CDN there's no blah blah blah there's not all that stuff in a real system design you you won't be able to go in depth to all those components because even in this thing I wrote this three or four page design talk and there were so many damn problems with it and I think that's what a system design interview should be about you have something that feeds into some workers that transcode videos well where are the bottlenecks what happens when it fails what's it going to do is is it going to retry I think that's what a system design interview is about and I think in many cases at many companies that is what they do they dig into those details for example you have a message CU a pub sub that feeds into a fleet of workers that can kind of Auto scale but is it going to be pole based or push based and why in this design do when I implemented the project I went with push based just because it was more simple but 100% poll based is better and I literally talked about why that is it's not about like drawing the boxes it's about actually understanding the boxes the details the differences the best way to understand that is to implement certain things if you watch system design video try to implement that application because it it doesn't take as long as you would think this YouTube clone it probably took me like 60 hours of coding to implement this try that and you'll improve your coding skills and your system design skills at the same time you'll improve your ability to read documentation at the same time I had used a lot of those Google Cloud tools before but if you can't like quickly code up like a basic clone of something then you should probably improve your coding skills cuz I'm not even that good at coding I didn't even write that much code at Google even I was able to do it did you follow a guide or write it on your own I pretty much wrote it on my own technically I kind of in a sense I followed a guide I made a system design video about designing YouTube and I more or less used this architecture I didn't include certain components I did not include a CDN just to keep it simple if you look at this system design video and I had people in the comments tell me hey this system design is overly simplistic it won't work well I pretty much implemented a basic clone with it in theory they're right it is in some ways overs simplistic but in a real interview do you really think somebody can design the entire YouTube clone and optimize every single component I mean do you have any idea how complicated that would be even in a system design interview you end up focusing on one component I read the docs at Google which tell you how to conduct a system design interview and they specifically said do not ask overly vague questions like how do you design YouTube how do you design this massive service and they say if you do end up asking that at some point you have to narrow the scope of the interview the reason I title it this way is That's The Meta of system design content on social media and YouTube and stuff it's never that simple in a real interview you always narrow down into one part in that personal project I very specifically focused on the transcoding I didn't imp implement the user interface very much at all even this I kind of touched on it in the video video streaming pretty complicated you're telling me that if you're preparing for system design interviews not only do you got to know in detail all these hundred ass components but you also got to be an expert on video playback how many people can say they are I worked with several senior Engineers they were very good and I can tell you of course they don't know how to build the entire YouTube system of course they don't know everything about video streaming most people don't and most people don't have to but it's not about that like in a system design interview you can demonstrate your skills in other ways senior Engineers write a lot of design docs do you think the design dock that they write is we're designing this massive system for the first time one senior engineer is just going to tell me exactly how to do it no they design very small systems and even that is really hard system design interviews are really misleading nobody's designing this massive stuff they are designing small things and doing it really really well whereas in system design interviews people are designing big things very very poorly

Original Description

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The video discusses the flaws in system design interviews and highlights the importance of understanding the details and nuances of system design. It emphasizes the difference between theoretical system design and real-world implementation.

Key Takeaways
  1. Understand the basics of system design
  2. Learn to identify bottlenecks and potential failures
  3. Practice implementing system design concepts
  4. Focus on a specific component or subsystem
  5. Read design docs and learn from senior engineers
💡 System design interviews are often misleading, and it's not about designing a massive system, but rather about understanding the details and nuances of a specific component or subsystem.

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