List of tips on how you can do better in your system design interview
Interviews are a phase that can turn out to be life changing, don’t you think? Imagine going for an interview at your dream company and (God forbid) you freeze. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine because we’ve got some tips for you to keep in mind when you go for your interview.
The system design interview is a type of behavioral-based interview. This type of interview is used to tap into your experience, skills, and abilities in order to determine if you should be hired for the role. In this interview format, you’ll be given a hypothetical scenario to solve.
This might include designing an airport baggage handling system or figuring out how to store digital data that grows each day without running out of space. The interviewer will analyze the way you articulate your ideas through the process and make a decision on whether or not you should be employed for the job. Keep reading for 10 tips on how you can ace the system design interview!
Brainstorming Questions
Before you enter the interview, make sure you’ve done your homework. You should brainstorm potential questions they might ask you! Make a list of all the ideas that come to mind and work on them one by one.
For example, if your interviewer asks what a good system design would be for an airport baggage handling system, your first thought may be sorting bags by destination. Then, think about what could go wrong with this idea (How would passengers know where to find their bag?) and how you could fix it (What if there was signage?).
Your list should be comprehensive enough so that when the interviewer asks a question you can quickly come up with an answer. This will show that you are prepared for any scenario and have been thinking about it beforehand.
Putting Your Ideas on Paper
Designing a system is all about coming up with an idea and putting it on paper. The first step, before you even think about the logistics, is answering the question: “What do I think would be a good way to solve this problem?”
To answer this question, you need to have a lot of different ideas in mind. This means that your answer should cover everything from the tiniest details to the most general points.
For example, if your interview involved designing an airport baggage handling system, your thoughts could involve baggage belts and carousels as well as what type of information needs to be communicated to passengers.
Once you have your problem-solving process laid out, you can then start developing more specific solutions.
10 Tips on How you can Ace the System Design Interview:
Analyse how a system design interview works
- Interviews for system design often last 45–60 minutes and begin with a broad question, such as “create Twitter.” Then you’ll be asked to provide a high-level design that shows the many system components that will be needed, how they’ll be connected, and any trade-offs you’ve made in your approach.
- The number of interviews you’ll have depends on the position you’re applying for. As a general rule, the further up on the corporate ladder you go, the more system design interviews you’ll have.
- If you’re seeking for a junior post, your interviews will be more coding-oriented, with a maximum of two system design interviews. There’s a chance you don’t have any. If you’re seeking for a career as a more senior software engineer or as a software development manager, you may expect system design interviews to be considerably more important.
- System design questions are utilized in TPM interviews, as well as maybe in recruiting for other technical professions, in addition to software engineer interviews.
- If you already have a system design interview set with a business, click on the corresponding link below to learn more about their methodology and review prior questions.
Hone your skills
You’ll need to rely on a broad variety of expertise across diverse ideas to answer open-ended questions like “how would you design Twitter’s hot topics?” or “create TikTok.” With so much to discuss, you’ll need some sort of strategy to help you organise your thoughts.
6. Search and jot down the important concepts
7. Understand how common system components work at a high level.
8. You’ll also want to understand how these elements interact with one another, as well as any applicable industry standards or important compromises:
- Network protocols and proxies enable any networked computer to communicate with one another, regardless of their location or the hardware or software they use.
- Databases are critical components of the world’s most complex technological systems.
- Three typical criteria for evaluating system performance are latency, throughput, and availability.
- Load balancing is the technique of dividing jobs among a group of computer nodes in order to increase the system’s performance and dependability.
- Leader election algorithms illustrate how a cluster of nodes without a leader can interact with one another in order to pick one of them to be the leader.
- Caching is a strategy for reducing costs and improving data retrieval times and throughput by storing copies of frequently used application data in a layer of smaller, quicker memory.
- Sharding is the process of horizontally expanding a database system by dividing it into smaller “shards,” or distinct database servers, each of which contains a portion of the entire dataset.
- Techniques for streaming large amounts of data to or from a server include polling, SSE, and WebSockets.
Practice Sample questions & Mock Interviews
Big internet corporations must accommodate an ever-increasing number of users. As a result, their teams must be able to create extremely scalable systems.
As a result, these interviews will need you to work with distributed systems on a wide scale.
Consider the following terms: availability, scalability, partition tolerance, dependability, storage, databases, core systems, and so on. The questions will be open-ended and will feel more like a conversation. As a result, you’ll want to demonstrate that you can be both creative and organised at the same time.
The more experience you have with system design questions like these, the better prepared and at ease you will be during your interviews.
You’ll need to rehearse under actual interview situations to succeed in your system design interviews, so you’ll be ready to perform when it matters.
Practicing interview questions out loud or with peers is the simplest approach to begin practicing under simulated interview situations.
9. Do it on your own
Interviewing oneself out loud is a terrific method to practice all of these different sorts of questions. This may seem unusual, but it will help you explain your replies more effectively during an interview.
To imitate a whiteboard session, use a piece of paper and a pen, or, if you have one, use a whiteboard. Excalidraw, Visual Paradigm, and Sketchboard.me are examples of online white-boarding programs that are particularly good for practicing for virtual interviews.
Play both the candidate and the interviewer, asking and responding questions as if you were two individuals in an interview. It works, believe us.
- Get feedback from your peers
After you’ve begun to get the hang of certain programme manager interview questions by practising on your own, doing mock interviews with friends or peers is a wonderful next step.
This is especially useful if your acquaintance has conducted system design interviews before or is at least familiar with the procedure. On our free peer-to-peer mock interview platform, you can also locate peers to practise with.
- Get some practise with former interviewers.
Practicing with a group of people may be quite beneficial, and it’s typically free. However, you’ll eventually see that the input you’re getting from your peers isn’t really benefiting you. We propose practising with ex-interviewers from big IT firms after you’ve reached that point.
It’s excellent if you know someone who has conducted interviews at Facebook, Google, or another major tech firm. However, for most of us, finding the appropriate relationships to make this happen is difficult. It may also be tough to rehearse for several hours with that individual unless you are really familiar with them.
How to prepare for your presentation
10. Presentation
Your presentation is the most crucial part of your interview. You need to be able to present in a clear, concise way. Practice your presentation out loud with a friend or family member and make sure you’re not rushing through it.
Conclusion
You might have heard it before: a good system design interview is a tough process to ace. But with the right preparation and mindset, you can succeed.
Whatever your feelings about the interview process, there’s no denying that system design interviews are an important part of the hiring pipeline. For those who are nervous about interviewing, we put together this list of ten tips that can help you ace your next system design interview.
Author- Sejal Shaw
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