System Design Interviews: What distinguishes you from others?

The objective of the system design interview is to assess your ability to design a complete system from start to finish on your own.

You will be given an open-ended design problem, and you will be expected to flesh out the requirements and come up with key pieces of the system.

Here are the seven characteristics that will distinguish you from others.

1. Eliminating vagueness

What does it mean?

• Asking questions to clear the boundary of the system.
• Identifying the limits and scope of the system.

Examples

• Are we going to support one million users?
• Will there be any push notifications for updates?

Check Grokking the System Design Interview to learn about important distributed system concepts.

2. Being able to ask the right questions

Examples

• If we are going for lower latency, what minimum throughput should we expect from the system?
• Since we will be storing data for global users, should we store data near the user's location to reduce latency?

3. Making reasonable assumptions

Examples

• We will prioritize high throughput and a reasonable latency.
• We will adopt a pull data model for less active users and switch to a hybrid (push & pull) model for highly active (or celebrity) users.

4. Identifying and prioritizing the core requirements of the system

Examples

• Users should be able to upload videos and attach them to their tweets.
• It is important for the system to be highly available, but consistency can take a hit. The user should always be able to access the system, but it's okay if they sometimes see inconsistent data.

5. Analyzing different solutions and tradeoffs

Examples

• SQL vs. NoSQL
• Availability vs. Consistency
• Throughput vs. Latency

6. Making reasonable choices

Examples

• Since we will be storing a massive amount of data, we will partition our data to distribute it to multiple servers.
• Since we need low latency, we'll store the data near the user's location.

7. Identifying and resolving bottlenecks

Examples

• Is there any single point of failure in our system? What are we doing to mitigate it?
• Do we have enough service replicas running such that a few failures will not cause a total system shutdown?

Conclusion

➡ Practice these techniques to distinguish yourself from others!

➡ Learn more on these approaches in Grokking the System Design Interview and Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview.

Read more on System Design and Coding Interviews:

• System Design Interviews: A Step-By-Step Guide
• System Design Interview Question: Designing a URL Shortening Service
• Grokking LeetCode: A Smarter Way to Prepare for Coding Interviews