Please stop the coding challenges

A partner of a friend quit their job earlier this year. They then took 4-6 weeks to prepare for each interview with Big Tech companies (4-6 weeks for Meta, 4-6 weeks for Stripe, etc.). Along the way, they also took random interviews just to practice and build muscle memory. They would grind leetcode several hours a day after researching which questions were likely to be encountered at each Big Tech.

This paid off and they accepted an offer for L6/staff at a MAANG.

Talked to them this week (haven't even started the new role) and they've already forgotten the details of most of what was practiced. They said that the hardest part was studying for the system design portion because they did not have experience with system design...but now made staff eng. at a MAANG. IRL, this individual is a good but not exceptional engineer having worked with them on a small project.

Wild; absolutely wild and I feel like explains a lot of the boom and bust hiring cycles. When I watch some of the system design interview prep videos, it's just a script. You'll go into the call and all you need to do is largely follow the script. It doesn't matter if you've actually designed similar or more complex systems; the point of the system design interview is apparently "do you know the script"?

Watch these two back to back at 2x speed and marvel at how much of this is executed like a script:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qu1F9BXow

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-eupuDVEc

Have you worked with them since they went through this regiment? Doing a DS&A coding problem regiment + system design will change you as an engineer. You might be surprised how good they've become.

Also they say they've forgotten. But if they were able to get that position, they probably could do medium level leetcode problems. So, I'd doubt they've forgotten all of it. I'm pretty sure they'd still be able to solve easy level problems, which most people can't solve off the cuff. They also probably still know the complexity of a bunch of essential backend operations (search, sort, array and hash lookups, tree & graph traversals, etc).

The point is not that the friend didn't pick up some implicit knowledge or become a sharper engineer than they were before grinding, it's that by exploiting the screening strategy, they got placed into a job they're not truly qualified for.

Are they bright enough to fake it until they make it? Maybe, but that's not going to be the case for many of the countless placements that were made like this, and hints at why both product and software quality is in bad shape these days.

But on the other hand, it's also not a very strong signal for my years of experience working on and designing portions of systems. I've never actually done "design a system from scratch", because every system that is big and complex evolved from some smaller and less complex system.

So the kinds of questions that come up in these system design interviews are best answered in real life with "I dunno, I'd pick something simple and refactor it later if it becomes a bottleneck".

"What kind of database would you choose for this?" "Whatever we're already using in production for other things." "How would you model this data?" "As simply as possible, so that we can get it out fast and start learning things."

But these are not interesting answers in these interviews. I have usually found myself saying "well, in real life, I would advocate for simplicity and iteration, but for the purposes of this interview, I'm happy to discuss potential trade-offs in technology selection, architecture, and data modeling".

But I think it's easier to study up on the "right" answers to the architecture and modeling questions, without spending a lot of time learning how to start simple and when to evolve toward complexity, etc.