Here's a link I saw on Hacker News tonight with some interview tips:...

Here's a link I saw on Hacker News tonight with some interview tips:…

Here's a link I saw on Hacker News tonight with some interview tips: http://blog.palantir.com/2011/10/28/how-to-rock-a-systems-design-interview/

Google asks these types of interview questions too, especially in Site Reliability Engineering, and I've seen some candidates shine, and some candidates fall flat. I'm not going to give away my secret questions, but I do expect people I interview to at least have passing familiarity with:
* Latency constraints
* Synchronization constraints
* Bandwidth/throughput constraints
* Memory constraints
* Sharding
* Caching
* Master election vs. being fully distributed
* etc. etc.

If you're about to graduate, and haven't worked on a large system, don't panic. You can still study things like hadoop, cassandra, etc. and figure out why they were built the way they were, and get an idea of the idioms they use. And there is some tolerance built into the system for people who haven't had first-hand experience yet - a lot of this stuff can be reasoned from first principles on the fly if need be. And ask lots of questions about scope and constraints - they tend to make it easier to figure out what's possible and not possible.

And yes, it turns out that good large systems design abilities pay off when you become a SWE or an SRE. We sit in on design reviews frequently in order to make sure people are designing things sensibly. "No, bandwidth-throttled pull-based replication will not and cannot have a maximum guaranteed replication latency of under a minute. If you care about minute-level consistency, use a distributed write with a quorum (e.g. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/36971.pdf )." "No, you cannot expect your feature to flip from 0% to 100% instantly, you have to deploy in stages so you accept new requests load-balanced to you even if you aren't serving the new feature yet", etc. etc.

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