Technical Interview Success - System Design

Overview

Please come prepared to

  1. Do a technical interview
  2. Screenshare and walk your way through your thought process.

It will be an intentionally ambiguous system design question.

Remote Meeting Quality

Remote Meeting Quality

Preparing

Examples like this are a good starting place. Suggest reading the comments too since some people felt there were gaps not addressed in the video itself.

Success Suggestions

To get the best results:

Speak out loud, speak your thought process.

  • If you are silent - we don’t know what you are thinking.
  • We are looking for your ability to explain yourself as much as the actual result.

All you need is a notepad or code editor.

As appropriate you may also use virtual whiteboard type tools, like google draw.

  • Write or draw relevant stuff
  • Imagine you are constructing a document you would share with other teammates who may not be on the call.
  • Drawing diagrams when appropriate is optional but encouraged.

Coding style

  • Pseudo code to showcase general direction of architecture
  • High level notes and rough function headers are expected.
  • Don’t try to write code that will compile. Do keep in mind fundamentals of computer science.

For example these are all acceptable:

  • “We will walk the list of things, do something to make something happen”
  • plant_something(Tree)
  • get_prepreation_methods()
  • example of concrete method: dig_hole()
  • meaning_of_life = SuperDuperMagicService().get_meaning_of_life()

Format

There will be a series of questions.
The goal is to build a conversation around those questions so do your best to keep answers to the point so we may progress the conversation.