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The humility check should be bi-directional

… The humility check should be bi-directional. It has been my experience that interviewers tend to be the least humble people at a company. The power dynamic is obvious and it's not in the character at most startups where a "senior" engineer high on hopium can settle themselves into their rightful place.

Original discussionA Senior Engineer's Guide to the System Design Interview376 source comments · at import
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HO

Companies already look at resumes, and the interview is a good way to double check things in a pass/fail manner. It's not like the SAT where you take a single test that sorta determines where you go, but even that is useful as a broad measure. Like if I'm in a top school's admissions and see 1800/2400 (idk the new scoring), there'd better be an explanation. I don't know how else you're supposed to do it.

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HO

> I may not know a ton about AWS or another cloud provider but I can put the document together that describes how it will be looking when it's done. That is architecture. Somewhere between UML and word documents. > What these interviews are checking, and the one you are describing, is whether or not I can parrot the correct code-words. Lambda, elastic cache, all this other nonsense. Maybe we've just had very different architecture interviews. All the ones I've given or received were the way you'd want. I've never specified a cloud product in these. At most might say "let's use something like Postgres." Amazon for instance didn't care that I couldn't name any of their products. Kafka example sounds awful. I'm sorry, but on the other hand, sounds like you dodged a bullet.

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SO

You are interviewing for the wrong companies. You are a great fir for infra teams or something like my team :)

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