Software development companies often test their industry candidates for system design skills during interviews.
We invited a senior engineer and manager (L5/SDEIII), from a FAANG company, to conduct a mock system design interview at our event. We also invited an experienced developer and individual contributor (L4/SDEII) from another FAANG company as the interviewee. More than a hundred software developers joined our event.
Our interview took an hour. It was pretty different from many learning materials online, such as YouTube videos covering system design interviews. Here are a few of the key differences:
After the interview portion of our online event, our interviewer let us know some of the essential soft and hard skills he looks for in a candidate. ( To be clear, these are NOT official FAANG interview rubrics, but a high-level summary of the interviewer's experience interviewing for different companies and projects)
Soft skills:
- Gathering requirements
- Making decisions and justifying tradeoffs
- Describing the solution using concise language and accurate technical terms
Hard skills:
- Design quality: scalability, reliability, efficiency (L4/SDE II, L5/SDE III)
- Essential facts about existing software solutions and hardware capabilities (L4/SDE II, L5/SDE III)
- Project lifecycle awareness, such as how a project is developed and maintained (L5/SDE III)