I am on the interviewer side of ~1 system design interview per week and have done probably around 100 of them at Google and other companies.
Most of the advice here is good, although it could be condensed quite a bit.
The biggest red flag for me as an interviewer is when candidates list off concepts or technologies they don't understand. DO NOT say things like "we can't do this because of the CAP theorem" or "we should add a cache to reduce latency" unless what you are saying is true and you can explain why this is true (the guide mentions this).
The biggest green flag is when the candidate obviously has thought deeply about related problems and made design decisions based on real world constraints and requirements. If you bring up a lot of related things you have worked on, explain why you made the decisions you did in those scenarios, if its obviously related to the question, and if you don't spend too much doing it, then you will definitely get a positive recommendation from me.
The purpose of the system design interview is to convince me that you could build, or lead a team to build, the thing that we are discussing at a company like the one where you are interviewing. I feel like I can easily see through interview practice or coaching, so I don't recommend spending more than an hour or so "preparing" for system design interviews. Unless you are interviewing somewhere with very inexperienced interviewers...
Most of the advice here is good, although it could be condensed quite a bit.
The biggest red flag for me as an interviewer is when candidates list off concepts or technologies they don't understand. DO NOT say things like "we can't do this because of the CAP theorem" or "we should add a cache to reduce latency" unless what you are saying is true and you can explain why this is true (the guide mentions this).
The biggest green flag is when the candidate obviously has thought deeply about related problems and made design decisions based on real world constraints and requirements. If you bring up a lot of related things you have worked on, explain why you made the decisions you did in those scenarios, if its obviously related to the question, and if you don't spend too much doing it, then you will definitely get a positive recommendation from me.
The purpose of the system design interview is to convince me that you could build, or lead a team to build, the thing that we are discussing at a company like the one where you are interviewing. I feel like I can easily see through interview practice or coaching, so I don't recommend spending more than an hour or so "preparing" for system design interviews. Unless you are interviewing somewhere with very inexperienced interviewers...