As somebody that gives systems design interviews most weeks, you’d be surprised how many candidates don’t put the api gateway but magically go from the TCP load balancer to the services inside the cluster, or how basically nobody is ever able to explain how a CDN works (as in, put the CDN behind the API gateway, note I have seen this in a company in production too). Or how some candidates will have redis and Postgres and do magical cross storage transactions.

And these are all candidates with 5+ years experience, sometimes 10+. I hate the leetcode gauntlet, but I also am really surprised how much worse candidates are now on average that they used to be (I’ve been around for about 25 years now), and how the minute you try to dig a little deeper to see if they know how things really work, the more it seems that they have no understanding whatsoever of the basics and somehow treat computers as magical black boxes.

I do understand I am privileged by having grown with the technology, starting in the 8-bit era, through an electronic engineering degree, and now in k8s etc. but with so much educational material available for free you’d think that even people in their 20s/30s now should be able to have a better idea of how things work.