System Design Q&A and Videos

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. There are several loud, opinionated, dominant personalities on my team. Some of them are E6. They often talk over each other as well as the rest of the team, so the rest of the team rarely contribute to discussions anymore. When a teammate (E5) presented his RFC to our team today, the dominant personalities started questioning his design decisions and talked over him when he tried to defend them. My teammate looked so discouraged and beaten down at the end of that meeting. When I brought this up to my EM in a 1:1, he said it's a people problem -- people are not being respectful. I asked my EM if he could coach those people, but he said he prefers to invest in people like me who are interested in learning & growing.

• Is this a lost cause?
• Are there techniques to handle these dominant personalities skillfully? Or do my teammates & I just need to develop "thick skin"?

I am trying to start a conversation to get across my technical proficiency so that the manager is likely to recommend me for an interview at the big tech company. The company has an engineering blog that I have read, but not sure what I should ask. This is for a mid-level (ideally senior) backend role. The manager has said that if I send them a list of questions they would be open to a call to discuss said questions.

Also the company is Uber ->

I am starting to prepare for system design questions. I would like to know if anyone has thought of grouping/categories when it comes to similarity among those problems?

For example, ecommerce (amazon) and service delivery platform (doordash) based problems has common trait of search, one can easily use the same solution across both the systems (to search for the products on amazon and to search for restaurants in doordash)

Also is there any list of must know system design problems for interviews at senior/staff level?

An E6 and I recently joined an existing team and are working with an E6 who has all the historical context on the project's requirements/limitations in his head. The PM is brand new to the team and the company. The EM and designer are also fairly new. The newer E6 often proposes architectural directions that the more tenured E6 shoots down due to this context. Is there a good way to extract all this context from the more tenured E6? I feel like we're often throwing things on the wall and just seeing what doesn't get shot down -- things get shot down more often than not, unfortunately. The more tenured E6 said it'll take too long to document all the context.

For my current project, I have 2 broad options for the infra/platform to support the feature:

1. Using a proven technology that has existing use cases within Meta but a somewhat limited API
2. Using a new technology that's not completely done yet and has uncertainty, but should have better APIs and performance

There's also the option of trying to do both, benchmarking them against one another, and then choosing the better one. However, I don't think we'll have the time to do that.

All this being said, any thoughts on which technology to go with?

I have Staff interviews lined up with FAANG companies and would like to learn from the best resources out there. What has helped you the most in your journey/experience?

Hi everyone,

So a few days ago I was assigned to design the architecture for a small feature, which I presented to the team on a meeting. During that meeting, a colleague of mine implied that he was directly involved with crafting the design which wasn’t the case indeed. How would you guys handle this? Personally, I believe just for a single case it doesn’t make it a reason to address it, but if it gets repeated it might need some careful consideration.

I've been working as a software engineer for 9+ years. Even though graduated in CSE, I never put a great effort in learning DSA into deep. Nor did I found interest in solving problems in leetcode.

I mostly worked in startup jobs. The expectations are kind of clear here. Build apis and features and deploy.

I believe I know moderate amount of system design and build product from scratch using js tech.

Have hands on experience in Node, React and AWS. Lead ~4-5 members for a short time. Never had the opportunity to build product which needed a great scale. DB sharding, working in a system that had 100s of micrsoervices is something I have never experienced.

I'm making around $75k in UAE. How can I give myself a learning path which would lead me to a better paying job. Ideally ~120k+. Spending 2-3 hrs daily would be difficult because of personal commitment. Maybe 6-8hrs total in a week I can manage.

Thanks

Hello!

So, my job's getting outsourced this summer, and I'm deep into figuring out my game plan for interviews. I'm mostly a frontend engineer, working with Angular, SCSS, and ngRX for our app. I've dabbled in backend too, even went full-stack in my team, but my backend skills aren't great. My manager supports me marketing myself as a full stack person, but I'm wondering if going all-in on full stack jobs is worth the effort during the interview prep, especially since I'm not a big fan of backend work.

Then I wonder if the downside of applying for frontend jobs is that there are not that many and the barrier for frontend is lower (maybe because of coding bootcamps and it can be self-learned) so competition will be higher.

Now, I'm drowning in prep work - data structures, algorithms, frontend know-how, and system design. Recently got hit with a surprise system design coding round in an interview (an internal position I arrogantly thought I had in the bag) I thought was all about frontend and DSA. Did okay, but not stellar, and now I'm feeling unprepared for every interview. I feel crippled to even apply to positions. It's a bit of a mess.

So questions:

1. Any tips on tackling system design questions, especially the coding part? Most online resources seem to focus more on design rather than coding specifics.
2. How should I balance DSA, system design, frontend prep? What topics and how much time should I commit to each of them?
3. Also, am I on the right track leaning towards applying for just frontend roles?

Appreciate any & all feedback!!

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. I'm in the process of switching teams. While they're figuring out the paperwork, I've been invited to their roadmapping and architectural discussions.

The 2 E6s are dominating the discussions. The E6 iOS has been on the project since its inception a year ago and has all the context; the E6 backend has been helping out our team with the discussions and may eventually join our team. I'm the newest team member so I have the least context. The E6 backend's proposals usually sound like great ideas to me, but the E6 iOS often shoots them down and provides historical context on why those are bad ideas.

In my 1:1, my manager asked me why I'm not participating in the discussions. When I told him I don't have context, he told me to participate anyway. How do I participate effectively when I don't have context?

We are building a separate product with in a product based company most of the features are crafted just to impress the managers.

During the demo hacks are used to adjust the situation. Though I've recently realised even the API design and system design is not scalable. They are just build so that the current UX is displayed, too much hard coupling and meaningless design.

The HTTP response is dynamic as the demos were build on web and the back -end developers are not understanding that it is difficult to handle in a strictly typed languages.

I get by saying today, I'll write clean code and do my work neatly no matter what others are doing. Though I want to know how do I communicate well with them and build solid products, so that we make something re-suable and independent and sell it not just part of the current product but in terms of public APIs like Twitter, Reddit.

Lately I feel like simply discussing in these lines creates friction, but I have to speak in gentler way to get the job done effectively :)

What I've noticed is that FAANG companies don't seem to look beyond Data Structure and Algorithms (DSA) or system design in interviews, whereas medium-sized companies also consider other skills. For example, for a Python web framework, they might look at Django, Flask, or FAST. For a data engineer role, Apache Airflow might be important. ATS may not even pickup your resume unless they see very specific word like Django or Apache Airflow in your resume. It seems like it might be easier to prepare for big tech companies since they focus only on DSA, System Design, and behavioral rounds. In contrast, other companies look for such a wide range of skills that it's hard to master and work on all of them.

Let me know your views.

At my startup, we use Confluence to host various documentation. I'm working on a design document draft, and I have it saved within the org's Architecture and Engineering Space (basically a folder). I have some misgivings about placing it there since I've been regularly updating it, and it notifies everyone within that group whenever I do. I'm mainly putting it there for visibility, but some of the writing is half-baked. Since it's a small company, no one really cares, but I think this might reflect poorly on me if it were a bigger company. How does Big Tech generally handle this design doc process from first to final draft? Do engineers generally just keep it within their personal Space until it's ready for review?

Hey Folks, I have a System Design Interview with Figma. Is there some fundamental material that I can start from?

I was watching the system design playlist and while it's good it feels like it's frontend oriented. My question here is that let's say that we get a big epic to work on, where we have to do something similar of what is already implemented in the application, but this time we have to do something else on that similar line. The main point I want to emphasize is that we normally have screenshots from the product design side and we have to come up with models and apis and everything else(considering there are more than 10 apis to build).

What is the best way to proceed in such situations?

Hey,

I had bought a course from interview kickstart that expires on 20 days (post extension) and they are not able to extend it further.

I have 11 interviews left with them, which is really amazing given the talented interviewers they have.

I am applying for L6 (maybe L5) at Roblox, Google, Netflix and Uber.

Given the constraints, how do I best utilize the interviews:

• Is it better utilized for systems design or DSA?
• For folks who successfully clear DSA at FAANG+, how did you practice "talking" through the problems? What other resources did you use for mock interviews?

I was thinking of using ChatGPT for talking my mock interviews, is that a good idea? And using 10 / 11 for systems design and 1 for behavioral.

I am working on a side project. I may use GCP or AWS for it.

tldr of the system : Create a web ui to process input files and generate a tabular output giving the link to the dashboard .

I have a bunch of files generated , about 2GB in size in total , Account ID is the high level directory and inside each account there 50 log files each having specific content .

I want to create a UI using Angular framework . Using the UI I will upload the files to GCS /AWS S3 . Then the backend should trigger complex backend scripts, written will be written in Python or Java and then output file is generated. Using the output file a dashboard with few images embedded is generated.

In the end the UI should have a table which should indicate status of processing to COMPLETE and in another column show point to url of the dashboard.

I want to deal with least amount of security work as I want to avoid studying Oauth 2.0 authentication .

Few additional questions , non-system design questions =>

1. What are the things I should learn in Angular to cover most bases in this project, I am a backend engineer and going over youtube videos . I want to stick with Angular as I have few work projects going to come in coming months so it will help me to learn it .
2. I am unfamiliar with typescript . How much effort will it need to learn in order to code for this project. I am most familiar with Python only.