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I have a few questions for those who do system design interviews or have a solid understanding of system design.

  1. Do you think it is possible to automate system design interviews by creating assessments/tests for them?
  2. Do you think it's possible to create an automatic evaluation mechanism that will receive an input file that'll define the design and connections between components (Load balancer, servers, etc..) and evaluate it to see how it works for a given load?
    • As a human could you evaluate a final design if you had only the requirements and the final design that someone did?
Nane
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1 Answers1

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The problem is with the evaluation part - automated test could test knowledge and even some patterns, but that is not a representative data about a candidate. It's almost same as testing a java/.net/etc developer by giving them a quiz to solve. That says nothing about a candidate.

In system design, depending on level of a candidate, it's more about how the candidate handles the process and how they communicate&collaborate. I am completely ok if a candidate has gaps in their knowledge, I'll teach them if needed. But if the candidate has bad communication, attitude, lack of curiosity - that will be much larger red flag.

To your specific questions:

  1. You could create a system to assess system design questions, but that will be more like a smoke test. The risk here is losing candidates who are easy to teach their gaps.
  2. Yes; you can totally model a system with all components and see how it behaves under load. In very large systems, we have these models as it is not real for us to have a copy of prod due to enormous cost
AndrewR
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