Reflections and rantings from a system design interviewer

Summary

I've given hundreds of technical interviews in my career, largely on system design this past year. When I interview, I'm looking for signals to answer: What's the true breadth and depth of your knowledge in this space? How much trust and independence can I give you? Do you know when to ask for help? What are you like to work with? Do I want to work with you? How do you define importance, triage, and make tradeoffs? To what extent do you think about why you're doing something? Can you make and commit to a decision knowing that data is imperfect and ever-changing? I want people to succeed. This list exists because I kept seeing the same avoidable mistakes get in the way of strong responses. It frustrated me to now end that people would get in their own way of positive responses to my questions above. You are not sly. Your glasses betray you. I see the reflection of you switching between ChatGPT and our Excalidraw board. When I ask, "So, what do you know about Rokt?" and you respond with, "Oh, uh, not much, it's, um . . . the global leader in commerce-driven personalization, transforming the transactional moment into a high-value, performance-optimized revenue engine for the world’s most innovative brands," I want to roll my eyes out of the back of my skull. I want to know you. I want to hear your voice. How you think about the world, the problems you see, and the approaches you take. I do not expect you to know everything about everything. In the real world, I would want you to ask for help when you need it; a technical interview should be no different. I've written about the value of admitting, "I don't know, yet", and it's a positive signal to me if a candidate recognizes the limits of their knowledge. Reducing yourself to an LLM's mouthpiece without sharing your own thoughts signals that you likely won't come up with novel solutions as you defer to the wisdom of a model whose purpose is to provide the next most expected string of words. I care deeply about what I d...