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Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

While this advice may work for some FAANG companies, I can assure you this won’t work for Google, especially at higher levels. You won’t find their questions in any public test bank online (trust me, I searched after my interviews).

Also, a good system design interview isn’t about designing a “perfect” system (hint: there isn’t one), it’s about defending a reasonably considered design.

Google’s system design interview very closely approximates my day-to-day experience designing solutions with my teammates.

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At most of the companies I’ve interviewed at (except Google as you note), the hiring manager and principal engineer didn’t understand system design themselves. They only understood how to pattern match against a regurgitated answer.

Case in point, when asked how I’d build Slack, I spent most of the time on data persistence because slack stores all data forever even on the free plan. I got rejected because, “we don’t care how they store data.”

Ok, but that’s still a key part of the system design…

Very open ended question that requires clarification. Interviewing is about asking questions too.

Of course, it was a conversation and the engineer was happy to let me go in depth on storage after we discussed and dismissed other areas, like the front end, integrations, native apps which were not related to infrastructure.

We also covered other areas like messaging, authentication, authorization, read / write paths, etc… so it was very strange to get the response from the senior manager I got.

> I can assure you this won’t work for Google

I can assure you that it absolutely does work at Google.

I've done multiple interviews at Google, and have received a job offer from them, and every question I got asked was one that I had heard of before. (This was for an L4 position, so mid level. Also, it doesn't matter what happens at L6 or higher, as that is comparative rare for almost anyone who is doing interview practice).

Maybe your question is super secret, but the vast majority of other people's questions are not.

Google I have heard is a bit tougher. No worries, theres ten other companies that just want memorization that pay better than google.

To be clear, GP didn't mention designing a perfect system but providing perfect answers, which probably includes mentioning tradeoffs or being prepared to answer questions about them.

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