

In the black box example, you might ask, “well, what does the box hold? How many items does it hold? And who is the intended user?” Informs you of possible bottlenecks/problem areas.Gives you direction about where to proceed.Helps clarify what the user expectation of the system is.Helps you narrow the scope of what you’re supposed to do.What are “good” clarification questions, you ask?Ī good clarification question helps you achieve one, or more, of several things: One of the most useful strategies I personally employ is to ask clarification questions. How would you tackle the problem? There are no clear directions on what you need to build here, aside from the box being able to hold some items within it. Imagine that you’re being asked to design a black box. What you can do to remove these bottlenecks.

How you would think about the problem space.A good system design question usually sounds very ambiguous, and the reason for that is it’s supposed to give you a chance to demonstrate the following: There are no strictly right or wrong answers. This article is broken down into the following four sections:Ī core aim of a systems design interview is to give the candidate an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge. How to System Design: Tips from a Twitter software engineer Update (): If you’d like to join a group of students to learn more about system design, I’m organizing a small class together! You can go to this link to learn more, or visit my website: for more info. If you’re a fresh graduate with no experience in large-scale distributed systems, or even a seasoned engineer with years of experience under your belt, this article will be useful for you. In this article, I’d like to share those tips with you all. During my interview preparation process, I read up on a lot of material and prepared a set of notes on how to tackle system design problems. I recently wrote about how I landed offers from multiple top-tier tech companies. By Zhia Hwa Chong Crack the System Design interview: tips from a Twitter software engineer
