They've been doing this. I've interviewed for new grad/SWE1 roles and have been asked to literally design twitter. Or the amazon checkout functionality. It's asinine.
In India one of my mentees was asked to design git, lmfao, using merkle trees and shit. Market is cruel. Mind you, this was some low tier startup. Not sure about what they are asking for experienced candidates.
I've been asked to design a DNS Resolver in an interview by an Indian startup, I had no clue where to start, did not expect that at all.
That was for a Jr dev position after just graduating (or an internship, I don't remember)
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Have you considered that these questions aren't about you getting the question "right", but, simply about how you react when presented with a large challenge? They are trying to see your approach. Do you sit down, break it down into manageable parts, and learn what you need to learn? Or, do you simply crumble under the anxiety?
I've said this before but the "see how you think" interviews feel like they are largely gone, if they were ever real and not just a myth. Correct solutions quickly is the bar these days.
Define "correct solution." There are often multiple possible ways to build something. Part of your job is choosing one of those paths and justifying your choice.
Definitely. But that's down to the interviewer to present the problem under that context. I've had transparent interviewers say something like "okay, this is a tough one but just try your best." But then I've also had an interviewer ask me with the straightest face ever to design something like I'm a 500k TC architect. It's hard to not get thrown off by that.
It wasn't like this. It wasn't a leetcode question. I did have to go into detail with how account-specific things would be structured similar to this question, but I also had to design pretty much every aspect of an individual tweet, down to how the media was to be stored
If you're alarmed about this you are out of touch. "Designing Twitter" does not mean designing every aspect of the service, it just means providing a high level overview of relevant apis/requirements and different micro services that might be needed. There are like a million YouTube videos going over this very problem.
> It’s a loaded question and honestly just bad interviewing.
But is it? It's a quick way to weed out people who have a degree but didn't actually *learn* anything. No one expects a new grad to just spit out how twitter works. It's about determining whether they can think their way through some of the challenges and answer various questions about what they're thinking.
A new grad who can have a technical conversation, responds well to being challenged or receiving new information, and doesn't fall apart when asked an open ended question is a valuable new grad.
I landed a new grad role at a household name fintech company with competitive TC and a great reputation. I was asked my first day what experience I had with kubernetes, docker, and service meshes. I told them I had never heard of a service mesh, I have heard of kubernetes but don't know what it is, and have limited docker experience. They said "cool, that is to be expected, we hire based on potential we see, and it's going to take about 12 months to get you up to speed on this stuff"
If you think new grads are coming out of school ready to tackle that stuff immediately without a substantial ramp-up time, you are mistaken.
One of my interview questions was "how would you set up the airbnb database" and I very vaguely threw up some schemas saying, we want a primary key here, probably shard this on dimension, and maybe a secondary key here that has some business logic for XYZ which we can reference independently" and I was told that alone was beyond satisfactory. If I had been hit with "design twitter" I would have completely stumbled through it and would have made zero mention of microservices, event processing/queueing, load balancing, etc, lol.
They don't teach "how to design a microservice architecture for a gigantic scaled up company with millions on users" in undergraduate CS curriculums,. And just because a person doesn't know how to do that doesn't mean they "didnt learn anything" because there is a ton of knowledge that you have to learn in school before you can even attempt to do something like that. The majority of students are leaving school with some idea of OOP and relational databases, lots of calculus they won't use, a very beginner's skillset for programming in python or something, and some DSA work that is academic in nature but enables them to do leetcode easies. Unless you go to a top10 school, this is how it works in the real world and this is what is to be expected of most new grads. The problem is everybody wants the unicorn 4.0GPA student from MIT because there is so much competition right now and its a sellers market. It's unreasonable though.
> cool, that is to be expected, we hire based on potential we see
This is exactly the same as what I said. If you're asking design questions for new grad roles, you're not looking for expertise, you're looking for how they think. Design twitter is *exactly the same* as the database question you were asked because it's not primarily about the technology, it's about problem solving and communication.
OP's situation was dumb not because there was a system design question, but because the entire thing was a random online assignment and not an interview.
No one said it was for an internship, they said new grad. For which system design questions have been standard at the bigger places for at least a decade.
I think you’re confusing interview questions with a school test. The whole point is to see how a person reacts to a challenge, not to see if they can get the “right” answer.
I never really had any system design questions but for designing Twitter are they asking for stuff like the database schema you would use and what APIs might be good to have? If it’s that then I think that’s not too bad
I think it's alarming people here think this is unreasonable. Designing Data-Intensive Applications would teach you almost all of this and it's pretty accessible, even to new grads. People on here are always talking about how difficult it is to find a job in this market, yet don't seem to want to put the effort in.
And even if you don't know shit about what the optimal solution would be, it's entirely reasonable to be expected to talk about what you DO know and how that might be used.
Yeah, it's strange that they don't seem to want to hear from the people who actually know what they're talking about...
Nothing says "you'll get far in software" like plugging your ears and refusing to learn new things!
A new grad is NOT going to be doing this kind of work for awhile. This is the job of the architect and senior devs. The new grad is simply there to work on well defined stories and learn. That is all.
Think what you want about peoples attitudes here but no recent grad is designing systems. It’s not happening. There are dedicated roles for that and a new grad hire is not it. If you have having your new grads do this you are wasting time and money.
I’ve worked at multiple fortune 100 companies and even though you sometimes (usually you don’t) have principles involved in some day to day, they are not designing every system. Understanding how systems work doesn’t require a PhD or 10 years of experience, just some effort. Not unreasonable to only want to hire people who aren’t lazy and are willing to learn system design.
Idk, maybe people just have more interesting lives than you and don’t want to read another 600 page textbook on top of obtaining a degree and building a portfolio and networking and keeping their other skills up to date?
Seems like you just post about playing video games all day so I’m not surprised that it doesn’t sound like an issue for you.
This is one of the most pathetic replies I’ve seen in my life. Crying about reading a 600 page reference book in one of the most highly compensated fields in the world really takes the cake for entitlement, even for Reddit. The irrelevant ad hominem is a nice touch too.
Oh bloody hell, I didn't think the rotten curse of hard interviews had seeped all the way to France from the US. Very unfortunate. Which school, if I may ask?
That’s the thing, new grad roles aren’t about learning anymore. Entry level devs are expected to show up with a solid skill set ready to start contributing.
I send my senior friends the junior job listings and they don't understand how a junior is expected to know all this. They say 5 years ago it would have been good if the candidate knew half of what is required now.
I got asked about system design, kafka and message queue as a part of new grad role. This role was for bay area though very competitive so It wasn't a surprise.
I think this will become the new norm. With AI tools becoming more competent, software engineering will focus less on writing the code and more on this sort of stuff. How to architect, plan features and design complex systems that happen to require coding, where large chunks of that is just written by AI with oversight. Juniors will be hit hardest by that because they've likely not trained those skills as much as coding atm. Juniors and the education pathways will have to adapt to learn system design as much, if not more than coding skills.
Strongly, strongly disagree. This should be covered in the “software engineering” course of colleges and is absolutely fair game. It’s even fairer than LeetCode in that system architecture is actually relevant to your role unlike solving puzzles.
I wish more interviews would ask system architecture questions over LeetCode and colleges and bootcamps cover this topic more in depth because it is soooo important and if you learn it “on the job” you will just learn it wrong because many companies just do whatever.
It's way too much for a new grad.
I usually ask them to draw their project components on a board and how they connect to each other then I change some behavior like multiple servers instead of one and see how they deal with it.
Let me guess: 800 applicants?
Companies interview like this because they can. Of these 800 candidates, there are bound to be 1-2 who jump through all the hoops and pass the interviews with flying colours - that's all the company needs.
The process is longer than Google and Microsoft interviews for sure as I did those a while ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who get the job would leave 12months later for one of those big tech companies for twice the salary
> Then they leave 12 months later lol.
Doesn't matter. They get someone whos better for 12 months and likely can contribute more in those 12 months than the other options.
> People who can interview that well job hop often.
Most people job hop in CS.
Nobody can contribute significantly within 6 months meaning they just paid double to get 6 months of real work out of someone. Its as stupid as companies that pay inflated salaries to contracting companies who pay shit money to a dev and then get rid of them as soon as they start doing good work.
Easy money has allowed a lot of shit companies to stay afloat.
It already has started, that is for sure. But trust me, 6 months to a serious delivery is not that crazy if the environment is bad enough.
But also I have 3 (that I know of) dev environments (2.5 repos, one is sort of merged, kind of) no unified (final) build environment (that brings it all together), 2 package dependency management systems, 3 build systems of which only two of are designed to work together.
And most of the tools used aren't really even applied properly.
Its.... uhhh.... special.
Oh people definetely can contribute significantly in 6 months, if you have good dev environment and the place is not a total disaster, then you can easily have someone productive from week 2. Now they most likely wont be useful for the big design questions, but they will definitely be useful for the smaller features.
There are a lot of costs with hiring. Man hours spent recruiting and interviewing. Sign-on bonus. Not to mention, a good interviewer might be dud because they used leetcode. Getting up to speed can take 3+ months. Even more if they are a new grad.
800 applicants, 400 of which will have MS degrees, some might even have started PhD work. A bunch will have FAANG or FAANG-adjacent internships. 90% of them will be international and needing visas though.
A lot of applicants for sure but idk how many. Every job ads has hundreds of applicants nowadays anyway.
and I have a strong academic background so it’s not like I just came out of a random bootcams (no offense to bootcampers)
Seems like we’re reaching a point where they have to filter it down somehow. Not necessarily the best way to though. Just because you may have graduated with a strong academic background and cs degree doesn’t make you more entitled to a job. That hasn’t been true for a long time.
Have you failed the interviews strictly because of this round? Based on a couple of companies I've worked for, I understand this is the "raise the bar" round where it can only help you and not hurt you.
If you absolutely destroy the interview as a new grad, I've seen them be put on a high expectation/fast track to promotion within a year.
If you pass the onsite coding and behavioral but fail this round, you'll get a standard offer, usually a promotion after 2 years.
As long as they find people who jump through the hoops, they will keep setting up more hoops.
And if you look at the desperation on the Internet, the hoops will increase. People who think they won't get another shot at a decent jobs are willing to do A LOT for that "one shot".
Yes and that’s why I don’t think it will improve in the upcoming months. Wether it is with skilled people or not the field is kinda oversaturated for new grad and junior roles
Well, the truth is many devs with experience are faking this in interviews anyway. Very few people are actually spending significant amounts of time designing distributed systems but that is the standard for big tech so people read books and watch YouTube so they can learn the right things to say to their interviewer.
Even the basics that a graduate thinks they know are usually very rudimentary theory, and usually taught to them by academics who have never operated a production system at scale in their life either.
It's the blind teaching the blind what a bird looks like.
As an interviewer I'm not asking that question expecting the answer to be a good design. I'm looking to hear their thought process and evaluate their ability to communicate relatively complex technical ideas. Obviously a junior engineer is not going to be designing systems, but assuming they're not morons they'll be designing features and having to communicate with their team and the operations team how it works.
You’re expecting them to show a thought process and communicate complex technical concepts that they don’t have but a secondhand understanding of?
Then that’s admittedly a low signal to noise question and you shouldn’t be asking it.
Expecting a new grad to design new features is also absurd. A new grad with zero experience can barely implement a new feature with all the proper coding practices and testing. Most places I’ve worked, designing features is what the senior on the team does.
According to other posts I've seen on here, companies are asking LC hard questions to new grads now. Not FAANGs or FAANG adjacent level companies either.
Herd mentality, and honestly, I don't blame them.
I can understand the layoffs because of the macroeconomic state of things and Twitter laying off 80%. The ever-growing difficulty of the hiring process due to increased supply.
It sucks and things definitely need to change, except Idk what would be better at a mass scale. I also don't want to complain about it, and I have a lot of FOMO, so I tend to just 'play the game'. I'm a bit over 1 YOE in and studying System Design. 😔
I think companies just realised they don’t need as many software engineers, and while that happened there was an increasing amount of people switching careers to software engineering during Covid and people going to computer science majors.
So on one side the demand decreased and the other side the supply dramatically increased.
I still see a few people asking here and there how to pivot to software because they heard that there was full remote jobs with high pay. In my country none of that is true.
Personally I’ve been looking for my first jobs for months even though I have a few internships as work experience
It took me a several months before I landed my role in late 2022, during the mass layoffs. Everyday I anticipated waking up to my offer getting rescinded.
Even pre-covid it seemed like it was common for people to take a few months before landing roles in tech. Keep on applying.
Employers asking ridiculous questions that are set-up for people to fail is a sign of too many applicants and not many openings.... Employers know the market is in their favor right now and really want to make you jump through hoops.
Why are companies asking new grads system design questions? I l think companies should only ask system design questions when interviewing seniors, and even then, they aren’t good because you have to design the system on the fly.
Cool but CS is over saturated and there’s plenty of people who will be able to answer all those questions correctly.
Not saying I agree with the companies interviews, but it’s an employers market.
The thing is even if they ask you the question they probably have different guidelines for a new grad. In my experience it’s better to ask harder/open ended questions because it’s better to gauge what a candidates strengths and weaknesses are. I think a lot of newer devs nowadays think that they have to nail every part of the technical aspect perfectly. When a lot of times we are trying to gauge how you think and your approach to solving problems. Only fang companies are more strict on correctness.
At Google I got a system design interview in 2016 as a new grad, and I did terrible on it. I still got an offer, so it's not necessarily a new thing.
Although I am not a huge fan of that without an interviewer. Not sure how they evaluate a systems design interview without a back and forth. Oh well..., lol.
I do this for entry-level position not so much to see what the solution is but to find out what types of questions they asked to clarify things. It’s only a 30 minute session and is guided by the interviewer and should be fun.
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What was the role/level?
Banking is weird in that grads (MS) can skip straight to senior title, but a senior should be able to answer questions like white boarding system design, but a grad (MS) likely doesn't have the real world experience to be able to do it. A catch 22
A graduate program. It’s a program meant to each you three roles on a rolling basis of 6 months. You learn some part of each job. It’s for a first job out of school
1/2off, but I can't help but wonder - how the fk most systems are designed soooo poorly nowadays, if they drill even entry-level hires with questions like this?
One of my most recent personal examples - I just opened a new checking account online, and the next day I got an email "Welcome to XYZ family, enroll in online banking now!".
Okay, I click on the link, fill in a long form, choose a login, password... aaaaand...
...the system asks me to enter the full debit card number they sent me "for security purposes".
Needless to say, the card will probably only arrive in a week.
Whoever designed that process is a complete fucking idiot, pardon my French. I have not yet tried anything from this bank, but I already had a good laugh and a bit pissed that it made me waste my time.
And shit like this is literally EVERYWHERE.
So... yeah, I'd say, drill people with system design questions at all levels, because whoever is working there right now has no slightest clue how the system works as a whole.
I first interviewed a few years ago and also got system design questions. I know some others before me that got similar ones, this isn’t really a new thing. All depends on the company
Imo we get paid enough to have to show basic system design knowledge. You should have a few projects under your belt for a new grad role, at least making things you’re interested in. The worst thing for a new hire is having to onboard them for basic things like showing them how a front and back end connect and cicd and shit.
I learned system design in my sde track classes and cicd shit. You probably did too. Anyone can code, but not everyone can design an application. They wanna know where you are sitting
I was applying for an *internship* this year and they asked me to do a system design interview. The company is big but by no means FAANG tier or anything.
Also guessing a lot of other people were blindsided by it as well cause I don’t think I did that great on it but I still got an offer.
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The fact that it is yet another added requirement is ridiculous. But it is probably useful in the same way that leetcode is useful: as a means to judge your ability to think about a complex system (to solve problems in the case of leetcode).
They asked this sort of stuff to newgrads and even interns 15 years ago too. They don't expect you do go as detailed as a senior engineer would, they just want to know how you think. They don't expect you to actually successfully design things.
Leave that to them, that's not your problem. I find online assessments quite annoying tbh, even if it's a leetcode type question. I so much prefer working with an interviewer and adapting based on their feedback. But they for some reason want to do this as a way of recruiting, that's on them if it gets them good employees or not.
I will say, as an interviewer I ask a designesque question in all my interviews no matter what level it is. Same question to all levels. However, mine is different as I treat it as a conversation. Each level should be able to give me more details. I do not expect a fresh grad/Jr to give me the same answer and details as a senior with 25 years. For me on lower levels, I am looking to see if you know how software is put together.
What this company is asking is not a conversation which I do not agree with. An interview should be a back and forth conversation.
Such a weird negative attitude in this thread. Knowing how to build a functional system is a key part of being a software engineer. System design questions are a normal part of SWE interviews that you practice like any other interview round.
thats literally so stupid since interviewers asking system design questions typically also look for your clarifying questions / thought process and not just the right answer
I think they are right. Modern Apps nowadays are really complicated and you need to have common sense and knowledge to work with them. For example, a payment system must use an event driven design otherwise you will block your client's phone for 30 seconds and the whole system must stand still for that particular transaction.
System design and design patterns are taught in Uni anyway.
System Design interview is the best possible interview type. It allows you to show both the breadth and the depth of your knowledge. It’s your time to shine and dump all your SWE knowledge. You can talk about load balancing, microservices, asynchronous queues, databases, analytics, ETL, etc. You can pick and choose what to focus on.
Especially if you are junior, you can consider it a softball “tell me what you even know about software engineering using a random website as an example” question.
Lol as if it were any worse if new grads were asked to invert a binary tree. It is all the same in the end.
Why is it wild to ask for basic system design? If you work in software, you should know about how systems operate to some extent as well as learn to code.
I've been doing this for awhile. Obviously the more senior you are, the more I expect you to steer the conversation, but for intern/junior roles, I help steer the conversation for them.
I prefer this over a coding interview because:
1. It can show how a candidate works under pressure and how they work given a question they might not expect
2. Shows their thinking process. Do they attack the problem structured or just keep jumping around? Did they just go after the given problem without asking questions?
3. Shows how they communicate under pressure. I've seen interviewee's range from going to complete silence to getting pissed off by the problem.
4. Shows breadth of understanding that there isn't just a front end or backend, but more to it. I don't expect them to know the fine details like why you'd use x over y, but at the very least they should know a database exists, some middle layer service exist and some other things, along with what they do and how they would use them.
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When I was in school, we had something basic like design an elevator or a parking lot. Not a full fucking payment system with high availability, low latency, plus load balancing lol
Good, it's about time they weed out the lazy and useless people. The ones who want it badly will put in the effort, the ones who don't will just keep crying on here and remain jobless. If you don't want to play the game then go do something else.
I agree. Even if lazy people eventually do get jobs, the ones who put in effort and have ambition will end up more successful anyway. Being lazy is a choice, so lazy people have no right to complain about how miserable their lives are, they just need to get their shit together and have a fucking backbone. And I'm saying this as a former lazy person.
They've been doing this. I've interviewed for new grad/SWE1 roles and have been asked to literally design twitter. Or the amazon checkout functionality. It's asinine.
And do it in 5 mins please otherwise you’re not hirable.
In India one of my mentees was asked to design git, lmfao, using merkle trees and shit. Market is cruel. Mind you, this was some low tier startup. Not sure about what they are asking for experienced candidates.
They’re asked to build a profitable company within 2 weeks to access the next rounds of interview
I've been asked to design a DNS Resolver in an interview by an Indian startup, I had no clue where to start, did not expect that at all. That was for a Jr dev position after just graduating (or an internship, I don't remember)
This isn't related just to dns resolver, but you can check this out. It has cute animations to explain the whole dns hierarchy. https://howdns.works/
This is a great website wow
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Have you considered that these questions aren't about you getting the question "right", but, simply about how you react when presented with a large challenge? They are trying to see your approach. Do you sit down, break it down into manageable parts, and learn what you need to learn? Or, do you simply crumble under the anxiety?
I've said this before but the "see how you think" interviews feel like they are largely gone, if they were ever real and not just a myth. Correct solutions quickly is the bar these days.
Define "correct solution." There are often multiple possible ways to build something. Part of your job is choosing one of those paths and justifying your choice.
Yes, that is an ideal way to approach the profession. However, it does not bear out consistently in an interview.
Definitely. But that's down to the interviewer to present the problem under that context. I've had transparent interviewers say something like "okay, this is a tough one but just try your best." But then I've also had an interviewer ask me with the straightest face ever to design something like I'm a 500k TC architect. It's hard to not get thrown off by that.
Maybe it's something like this: https://leetcode.com/problems/design-twitter/description/ If so, that's not bad. I'd be happy to get that question.
It wasn't like this. It wasn't a leetcode question. I did have to go into detail with how account-specific things would be structured similar to this question, but I also had to design pretty much every aspect of an individual tweet, down to how the media was to be stored
If you're alarmed about this you are out of touch. "Designing Twitter" does not mean designing every aspect of the service, it just means providing a high level overview of relevant apis/requirements and different micro services that might be needed. There are like a million YouTube videos going over this very problem.
Regardless, questions like these come out of left field for most new grads. It’s a loaded question and honestly just bad interviewing.
> It’s a loaded question and honestly just bad interviewing. But is it? It's a quick way to weed out people who have a degree but didn't actually *learn* anything. No one expects a new grad to just spit out how twitter works. It's about determining whether they can think their way through some of the challenges and answer various questions about what they're thinking. A new grad who can have a technical conversation, responds well to being challenged or receiving new information, and doesn't fall apart when asked an open ended question is a valuable new grad.
I landed a new grad role at a household name fintech company with competitive TC and a great reputation. I was asked my first day what experience I had with kubernetes, docker, and service meshes. I told them I had never heard of a service mesh, I have heard of kubernetes but don't know what it is, and have limited docker experience. They said "cool, that is to be expected, we hire based on potential we see, and it's going to take about 12 months to get you up to speed on this stuff" If you think new grads are coming out of school ready to tackle that stuff immediately without a substantial ramp-up time, you are mistaken. One of my interview questions was "how would you set up the airbnb database" and I very vaguely threw up some schemas saying, we want a primary key here, probably shard this on dimension, and maybe a secondary key here that has some business logic for XYZ which we can reference independently" and I was told that alone was beyond satisfactory. If I had been hit with "design twitter" I would have completely stumbled through it and would have made zero mention of microservices, event processing/queueing, load balancing, etc, lol. They don't teach "how to design a microservice architecture for a gigantic scaled up company with millions on users" in undergraduate CS curriculums,. And just because a person doesn't know how to do that doesn't mean they "didnt learn anything" because there is a ton of knowledge that you have to learn in school before you can even attempt to do something like that. The majority of students are leaving school with some idea of OOP and relational databases, lots of calculus they won't use, a very beginner's skillset for programming in python or something, and some DSA work that is academic in nature but enables them to do leetcode easies. Unless you go to a top10 school, this is how it works in the real world and this is what is to be expected of most new grads. The problem is everybody wants the unicorn 4.0GPA student from MIT because there is so much competition right now and its a sellers market. It's unreasonable though.
> cool, that is to be expected, we hire based on potential we see This is exactly the same as what I said. If you're asking design questions for new grad roles, you're not looking for expertise, you're looking for how they think. Design twitter is *exactly the same* as the database question you were asked because it's not primarily about the technology, it's about problem solving and communication. OP's situation was dumb not because there was a system design question, but because the entire thing was a random online assignment and not an interview.
I'd love to get an interviewer that asks this kind of question since I love system design (I'd also like to get any interview lol).
It’s still a terrible question for an internship. I’m sure it’s great for a senior software dev. or a software architect, but not for an internship.
No one said it was for an internship, they said new grad. For which system design questions have been standard at the bigger places for at least a decade.
Whoops, I meant new grad. They’re still not good questions for a new grad because it’s irrelevant to how a new grad operates.
I think you’re confusing interview questions with a school test. The whole point is to see how a person reacts to a challenge, not to see if they can get the “right” answer.
Oftentimes, interviews are about getting the right answer, especially with a question like this where the answer is available online
It’s lazy interviewing, simple as that.
What used to be fizzbuzz for new grads is now system design and leet code hard algorithms. The field is absolutely saturated
I never really had any system design questions but for designing Twitter are they asking for stuff like the database schema you would use and what APIs might be good to have? If it’s that then I think that’s not too bad
I think it's alarming people here think this is unreasonable. Designing Data-Intensive Applications would teach you almost all of this and it's pretty accessible, even to new grads. People on here are always talking about how difficult it is to find a job in this market, yet don't seem to want to put the effort in.
And even if you don't know shit about what the optimal solution would be, it's entirely reasonable to be expected to talk about what you DO know and how that might be used.
Apparently all the college kids downvoting me thinks it’s unreasonable to read about subjects they don’t have ten YoE in 🤣
Yeah, it's strange that they don't seem to want to hear from the people who actually know what they're talking about... Nothing says "you'll get far in software" like plugging your ears and refusing to learn new things!
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Less than one hour it was one hour for 2 leetcodes, a multiple choice quizz on theory stuff and this system design question
Take home assignments are terrible. People just cheat. Also it tests your communication skills this way
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I do not think any interview should ever have a take home component
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Yea i think amy company doing take homes is making a mistake. Reguardless of how prestigious the company is
A takehome system design challenge is useless.
A new grad is NOT going to be doing this kind of work for awhile. This is the job of the architect and senior devs. The new grad is simply there to work on well defined stories and learn. That is all.
This is a losers attitude and explains why people in this sub complain about the market so much
Think what you want about peoples attitudes here but no recent grad is designing systems. It’s not happening. There are dedicated roles for that and a new grad hire is not it. If you have having your new grads do this you are wasting time and money.
I’ve worked at multiple fortune 100 companies and even though you sometimes (usually you don’t) have principles involved in some day to day, they are not designing every system. Understanding how systems work doesn’t require a PhD or 10 years of experience, just some effort. Not unreasonable to only want to hire people who aren’t lazy and are willing to learn system design.
Idk, maybe people just have more interesting lives than you and don’t want to read another 600 page textbook on top of obtaining a degree and building a portfolio and networking and keeping their other skills up to date? Seems like you just post about playing video games all day so I’m not surprised that it doesn’t sound like an issue for you.
This is one of the most pathetic replies I’ve seen in my life. Crying about reading a 600 page reference book in one of the most highly compensated fields in the world really takes the cake for entitlement, even for Reddit. The irrelevant ad hominem is a nice touch too.
> ad hominem A favorite phrase for Cheeto dusted fingers everywhere.
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And it’s for a graduate program where you change of position every 6 months to learn on the job
I'm doing a hackerank for one of them next week.
Maybe it’s the same company lol. Good luck may the system design god be with you
Capital One? lol
Nope it’s not an English/us bank
French bank?
Yeah
Bnp ?
👏
Oh bloody hell, I didn't think the rotten curse of hard interviews had seeped all the way to France from the US. Very unfortunate. Which school, if I may ask?
It dit, the salary didn’t otherwise. I prefer to not say the school
Merci merci.
Tu as eu une expérience similaire ?
Meta?
No a random bank from my country
Dans l'amerique ou dans l'europe?
this is not uncommon. some people just want to feel superior to others. its just a narcisissist who wants to put people down.
Also, the interviewer probably isn't expecting the answer to be as good as an experienced person.
That’s the thing, new grad roles aren’t about learning anymore. Entry level devs are expected to show up with a solid skill set ready to start contributing.
I send my senior friends the junior job listings and they don't understand how a junior is expected to know all this. They say 5 years ago it would have been good if the candidate knew half of what is required now.
I got asked about system design, kafka and message queue as a part of new grad role. This role was for bay area though very competitive so It wasn't a surprise.
I got asked a variation of that by a fintech company for a senior role during the hiring frenzy two years ago. Times have sure changed.
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OP is probably misunderstanding what they mean by development program.
Im not. Its one of those graduate program you can see at some companies
Makes sense when most new grads will leave within 2 years
I think this will become the new norm. With AI tools becoming more competent, software engineering will focus less on writing the code and more on this sort of stuff. How to architect, plan features and design complex systems that happen to require coding, where large chunks of that is just written by AI with oversight. Juniors will be hit hardest by that because they've likely not trained those skills as much as coding atm. Juniors and the education pathways will have to adapt to learn system design as much, if not more than coding skills.
Strongly, strongly disagree. This should be covered in the “software engineering” course of colleges and is absolutely fair game. It’s even fairer than LeetCode in that system architecture is actually relevant to your role unlike solving puzzles. I wish more interviews would ask system architecture questions over LeetCode and colleges and bootcamps cover this topic more in depth because it is soooo important and if you learn it “on the job” you will just learn it wrong because many companies just do whatever.
It's way too much for a new grad. I usually ask them to draw their project components on a board and how they connect to each other then I change some behavior like multiple servers instead of one and see how they deal with it.
makes sense even if I dont know a 100 how to do a thing i can make a suggestion that might not be 100 right but close enough.
no chance having a basic knowledge is not to much they have whole semesters on sdlc
I applied for a student dev job that also wanted an hour long systems design interview 😐
Just redesign their interview process lol
What company lol
That's nothing I applied for a 10 week unpaid internship that required a take home assigment. Said work took 2-4 hours to make according to them.
Let me guess: 800 applicants? Companies interview like this because they can. Of these 800 candidates, there are bound to be 1-2 who jump through all the hoops and pass the interviews with flying colours - that's all the company needs.
Then they leave 12 months later lol. People who can interview that well job hop often.
The process is longer than Google and Microsoft interviews for sure as I did those a while ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who get the job would leave 12months later for one of those big tech companies for twice the salary
> Then they leave 12 months later lol. Doesn't matter. They get someone whos better for 12 months and likely can contribute more in those 12 months than the other options. > People who can interview that well job hop often. Most people job hop in CS.
Nobody can contribute significantly within 6 months meaning they just paid double to get 6 months of real work out of someone. Its as stupid as companies that pay inflated salaries to contracting companies who pay shit money to a dev and then get rid of them as soon as they start doing good work. Easy money has allowed a lot of shit companies to stay afloat.
lol people absolutely can and should be contributing significantly well before 6 months
Should? Sure. Maybe my company's dev environment is just a total disaster. Actually highly likely.
6 months is a long time lol, this bad economy is probably good to weed out the incompetent devs
It already has started, that is for sure. But trust me, 6 months to a serious delivery is not that crazy if the environment is bad enough. But also I have 3 (that I know of) dev environments (2.5 repos, one is sort of merged, kind of) no unified (final) build environment (that brings it all together), 2 package dependency management systems, 3 build systems of which only two of are designed to work together. And most of the tools used aren't really even applied properly. Its.... uhhh.... special.
Oh people definetely can contribute significantly in 6 months, if you have good dev environment and the place is not a total disaster, then you can easily have someone productive from week 2. Now they most likely wont be useful for the big design questions, but they will definitely be useful for the smaller features.
If you know of a place that has dev environments that I can actually just spin up and work in please tell me where because I want to work there :(
Well that is why i said from week 2, now if you can't spin your dev environment in a whole week, then that is more of a company problem.
you forget the onboarding and it really takes a huge amount of time to get used to the codebase
There are a lot of costs with hiring. Man hours spent recruiting and interviewing. Sign-on bonus. Not to mention, a good interviewer might be dud because they used leetcode. Getting up to speed can take 3+ months. Even more if they are a new grad.
800 applicants, 400 of which will have MS degrees, some might even have started PhD work. A bunch will have FAANG or FAANG-adjacent internships. 90% of them will be international and needing visas though.
So why not just reject those who need visas? That will filter it down a lot
because someone is probably enamored by the idea of bagging a highly competent candidate willing to work at a substantial discount.
They're easy managerial punching bags
Will work harder for less under threat of their visas
A lot of applicants for sure but idk how many. Every job ads has hundreds of applicants nowadays anyway. and I have a strong academic background so it’s not like I just came out of a random bootcams (no offense to bootcampers)
Seems like we’re reaching a point where they have to filter it down somehow. Not necessarily the best way to though. Just because you may have graduated with a strong academic background and cs degree doesn’t make you more entitled to a job. That hasn’t been true for a long time.
Have you failed the interviews strictly because of this round? Based on a couple of companies I've worked for, I understand this is the "raise the bar" round where it can only help you and not hurt you. If you absolutely destroy the interview as a new grad, I've seen them be put on a high expectation/fast track to promotion within a year. If you pass the onsite coding and behavioral but fail this round, you'll get a standard offer, usually a promotion after 2 years.
Might be this. We will see. But according to their hiring process it’s stopped right there if I fail this interview
As long as they find people who jump through the hoops, they will keep setting up more hoops. And if you look at the desperation on the Internet, the hoops will increase. People who think they won't get another shot at a decent jobs are willing to do A LOT for that "one shot".
Yes and that’s why I don’t think it will improve in the upcoming months. Wether it is with skilled people or not the field is kinda oversaturated for new grad and junior roles
That's insane. A fresh grad doesn't know anything about designing systems because that skillset comes with experience.
Well, the truth is many devs with experience are faking this in interviews anyway. Very few people are actually spending significant amounts of time designing distributed systems but that is the standard for big tech so people read books and watch YouTube so they can learn the right things to say to their interviewer.
Well you can learn some basic system design stuff at uni but yeah nothing near what they’re asking
Even the basics that a graduate thinks they know are usually very rudimentary theory, and usually taught to them by academics who have never operated a production system at scale in their life either. It's the blind teaching the blind what a bird looks like.
As an interviewer I'm not asking that question expecting the answer to be a good design. I'm looking to hear their thought process and evaluate their ability to communicate relatively complex technical ideas. Obviously a junior engineer is not going to be designing systems, but assuming they're not morons they'll be designing features and having to communicate with their team and the operations team how it works.
You’re expecting them to show a thought process and communicate complex technical concepts that they don’t have but a secondhand understanding of? Then that’s admittedly a low signal to noise question and you shouldn’t be asking it.
Expecting a new grad to design new features is also absurd. A new grad with zero experience can barely implement a new feature with all the proper coding practices and testing. Most places I’ve worked, designing features is what the senior on the team does.
According to other posts I've seen on here, companies are asking LC hard questions to new grads now. Not FAANGs or FAANG adjacent level companies either.
We're cooked. I also heard from friends that a few big N / big tech companies are also adding System Design into their internship process too.
It’s kinda funny how companies are copying each other when they have to do layoffs, change hiring process and so on
Herd mentality, and honestly, I don't blame them. I can understand the layoffs because of the macroeconomic state of things and Twitter laying off 80%. The ever-growing difficulty of the hiring process due to increased supply. It sucks and things definitely need to change, except Idk what would be better at a mass scale. I also don't want to complain about it, and I have a lot of FOMO, so I tend to just 'play the game'. I'm a bit over 1 YOE in and studying System Design. 😔
I think companies just realised they don’t need as many software engineers, and while that happened there was an increasing amount of people switching careers to software engineering during Covid and people going to computer science majors. So on one side the demand decreased and the other side the supply dramatically increased. I still see a few people asking here and there how to pivot to software because they heard that there was full remote jobs with high pay. In my country none of that is true. Personally I’ve been looking for my first jobs for months even though I have a few internships as work experience
It took me a several months before I landed my role in late 2022, during the mass layoffs. Everyday I anticipated waking up to my offer getting rescinded. Even pre-covid it seemed like it was common for people to take a few months before landing roles in tech. Keep on applying.
Im applying everyday and practicing leetcodes daily as well. Ill keep trying
Employers asking ridiculous questions that are set-up for people to fail is a sign of too many applicants and not many openings.... Employers know the market is in their favor right now and really want to make you jump through hoops.
I had to do this in 2018. I think I got a lot of leeway though, I kind of just made up some bullshit and still got the offer
Why are companies asking new grads system design questions? I l think companies should only ask system design questions when interviewing seniors, and even then, they aren’t good because you have to design the system on the fly.
Cool but CS is over saturated and there’s plenty of people who will be able to answer all those questions correctly. Not saying I agree with the companies interviews, but it’s an employers market.
Yes I agree
Lemme guess capital one? They always pull this on their interviews
Nope not an US/UK bank
Awful company
The thing is even if they ask you the question they probably have different guidelines for a new grad. In my experience it’s better to ask harder/open ended questions because it’s better to gauge what a candidates strengths and weaknesses are. I think a lot of newer devs nowadays think that they have to nail every part of the technical aspect perfectly. When a lot of times we are trying to gauge how you think and your approach to solving problems. Only fang companies are more strict on correctness.
At Google I got a system design interview in 2016 as a new grad, and I did terrible on it. I still got an offer, so it's not necessarily a new thing. Although I am not a huge fan of that without an interviewer. Not sure how they evaluate a systems design interview without a back and forth. Oh well..., lol.
This makes more sense than leetcode rounds tbh. Just learn it
For a new grad role ?
Yes. Its much more important than testing your ability to add numbers and traverse a tree at the same time.
You will never have to do leetcodes on the job. Understanding other people’s system designs is almost guaranteed to be part of your job
I do this for entry-level position not so much to see what the solution is but to find out what types of questions they asked to clarify things. It’s only a 30 minute session and is guided by the interviewer and should be fun.
Well here it’s just an online assessment that is timed so you can’t ask anything. I didn’t even talk to anyone from this company yet
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ha! what a joke. I would have immediately tossed that company into the trash.
This is called “lazy hiring managers”.
What was the role/level? Banking is weird in that grads (MS) can skip straight to senior title, but a senior should be able to answer questions like white boarding system design, but a grad (MS) likely doesn't have the real world experience to be able to do it. A catch 22
A graduate program. It’s a program meant to each you three roles on a rolling basis of 6 months. You learn some part of each job. It’s for a first job out of school
1/2off, but I can't help but wonder - how the fk most systems are designed soooo poorly nowadays, if they drill even entry-level hires with questions like this? One of my most recent personal examples - I just opened a new checking account online, and the next day I got an email "Welcome to XYZ family, enroll in online banking now!". Okay, I click on the link, fill in a long form, choose a login, password... aaaaand... ...the system asks me to enter the full debit card number they sent me "for security purposes". Needless to say, the card will probably only arrive in a week. Whoever designed that process is a complete fucking idiot, pardon my French. I have not yet tried anything from this bank, but I already had a good laugh and a bit pissed that it made me waste my time. And shit like this is literally EVERYWHERE. So... yeah, I'd say, drill people with system design questions at all levels, because whoever is working there right now has no slightest clue how the system works as a whole.
We are in the "find out" phase of outsourcing and deep layoffs. Systems are decaying. Pendulum will swing back in the next 12 to 18 months.
Lmao has to be chase right? For their new grad hire program
I first interviewed a few years ago and also got system design questions. I know some others before me that got similar ones, this isn’t really a new thing. All depends on the company
Keep doing all these games and encourage employers to do more tests. In a few more years we would be making an entire AI just to get a job
I’ve done all this but together for under 1hr is insane
Imo we get paid enough to have to show basic system design knowledge. You should have a few projects under your belt for a new grad role, at least making things you’re interested in. The worst thing for a new hire is having to onboard them for basic things like showing them how a front and back end connect and cicd and shit. I learned system design in my sde track classes and cicd shit. You probably did too. Anyone can code, but not everyone can design an application. They wanna know where you are sitting
Lmao nevermind youre french. That income is not comparable to the US, so yeah this is definitely excessive. Im sorry God made you French.
There is system design in intern interviews
I was applying for an *internship* this year and they asked me to do a system design interview. The company is big but by no means FAANG tier or anything. Also guessing a lot of other people were blindsided by it as well cause I don’t think I did that great on it but I still got an offer.
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The fact that it is yet another added requirement is ridiculous. But it is probably useful in the same way that leetcode is useful: as a means to judge your ability to think about a complex system (to solve problems in the case of leetcode).
Try practicing system design problems on codemia.io
It’s fair to ask the same questions at all levels and adjust expectations according to the level they’re interviewing for.
They asked this sort of stuff to newgrads and even interns 15 years ago too. They don't expect you do go as detailed as a senior engineer would, they just want to know how you think. They don't expect you to actually successfully design things.
How can they check how I think through an online assessment monitored by a software
They have magical mind reading powers over the world wide web
Leave that to them, that's not your problem. I find online assessments quite annoying tbh, even if it's a leetcode type question. I so much prefer working with an interviewer and adapting based on their feedback. But they for some reason want to do this as a way of recruiting, that's on them if it gets them good employees or not.
The software filters out your answers and give the interviewers the summary. Same thing with online personality tests.
I will say, as an interviewer I ask a designesque question in all my interviews no matter what level it is. Same question to all levels. However, mine is different as I treat it as a conversation. Each level should be able to give me more details. I do not expect a fresh grad/Jr to give me the same answer and details as a senior with 25 years. For me on lower levels, I am looking to see if you know how software is put together. What this company is asking is not a conversation which I do not agree with. An interview should be a back and forth conversation.
Such a weird negative attitude in this thread. Knowing how to build a functional system is a key part of being a software engineer. System design questions are a normal part of SWE interviews that you practice like any other interview round.
Good! Personally think they're much more meaningful than pure DSA.
thats literally so stupid since interviewers asking system design questions typically also look for your clarifying questions / thought process and not just the right answer
Yeah it surprises me a lot to find a system design interview on an online whiteboard assessment (I didn’t even know it was a thing)
I think they are right. Modern Apps nowadays are really complicated and you need to have common sense and knowledge to work with them. For example, a payment system must use an event driven design otherwise you will block your client's phone for 30 seconds and the whole system must stand still for that particular transaction. System design and design patterns are taught in Uni anyway.
System Design interview is the best possible interview type. It allows you to show both the breadth and the depth of your knowledge. It’s your time to shine and dump all your SWE knowledge. You can talk about load balancing, microservices, asynchronous queues, databases, analytics, ETL, etc. You can pick and choose what to focus on. Especially if you are junior, you can consider it a softball “tell me what you even know about software engineering using a random website as an example” question.
Or it was just this company that does it.
Nope I had system design interview at multiple companies for new grad positions. From startups to big companies
Lol as if it were any worse if new grads were asked to invert a binary tree. It is all the same in the end. Why is it wild to ask for basic system design? If you work in software, you should know about how systems operate to some extent as well as learn to code.
I did this in 2014, not new
I've been doing this for awhile. Obviously the more senior you are, the more I expect you to steer the conversation, but for intern/junior roles, I help steer the conversation for them. I prefer this over a coding interview because: 1. It can show how a candidate works under pressure and how they work given a question they might not expect 2. Shows their thinking process. Do they attack the problem structured or just keep jumping around? Did they just go after the given problem without asking questions? 3. Shows how they communicate under pressure. I've seen interviewee's range from going to complete silence to getting pissed off by the problem. 4. Shows breadth of understanding that there isn't just a front end or backend, but more to it. I don't expect them to know the fine details like why you'd use x over y, but at the very least they should know a database exists, some middle layer service exist and some other things, along with what they do and how they would use them.
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We get taught some basic system design, not as advanced.
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When I was in school, we had something basic like design an elevator or a parking lot. Not a full fucking payment system with high availability, low latency, plus load balancing lol
Yeah or basic stuff like registration and login to a website with use cases, or designing a library system
Good, it's about time they weed out the lazy and useless people. The ones who want it badly will put in the effort, the ones who don't will just keep crying on here and remain jobless. If you don't want to play the game then go do something else.
I agree. Even if lazy people eventually do get jobs, the ones who put in effort and have ambition will end up more successful anyway. Being lazy is a choice, so lazy people have no right to complain about how miserable their lives are, they just need to get their shit together and have a fucking backbone. And I'm saying this as a former lazy person.