Why are System Design Interviews important?

As an engineer, whenever you think about starting to prepare for your next tech interview, two things come to mind immediately — coding interviews and system design interviews. There has already been written enough about coding interviews everywhere on the internet. Design interviews however are a totally different beast.

We explore a few of the factors that make System Design Interviews important below 👇🏼.

1. Designing a system is more Art than Science.

A lot of the questions that are asked in system design interviews are context specific. Context here depends on — systems that the interviewer has worked on, technologies that the company uses, systemic problems faced by that particular team based on their customers’ usage patterns. Since there are so many moving pieces here, it is difficult to create a singular source of preparation material. To solve such problems, more creativity is needed without going through all the possible combinations of such moving pieces.

2. It is harder to change the system design afterwards.

Once the entire team has committed to working on a particular design, it is much harder to change course, especially on larger systems. Although most of the systems can be designed with some flexibility or leeway for future changes, there are times when the projects hit a wall. In these cases, it becomes necessary to start from scratch and redesign the system. Therefore, it is much easier and less expensive to get the design right the very first time.

3. There is no substitute for experience.

Although more creative solutions are required or expected, having more experience designing systems helps in recognizing similar patterns of problems. A lot of the times, system design interview questions will be different than something you have worked on. In such cases, it helps to have worked on more number of difficult problems than less number of similar problems. For better or worse, this can only be achieved through real world experience.

4. System Design interviews decide your compensation and level.

Coding interviews might decide whether to hire you on the team or not. System design interview on the other hand, not only decide whether to hire you, but also what offer should be made to the candidate and what level. For a more senior position, system design interview performance will be scrutinized harder. Candidates who perform better here are offered much larger compensation packages on average.

5. System Architect positions are the most important just by their nature of work.

Because the stakes of these positions are so high, companies spend enormous amount of time and resources vetting these candidates. Their work is not limited to designing a particular system, but they are also hired for engineering leadership roles to take the team in the right direction. A lot of junior teammates and success of the product rides on the design of the system.

6. Most of the material available on the internet is quite terrible.

Every company does things differently based on their specific business needs. Therefore, the variety in these systems, their problems and solutions is quite large. No one person or even an organization has seen all the problems that can occur in the real world. This is the reason, most of the material put out on the internet generally focuses too much on only one area of the system design interview.

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