May 27, 2024
Object Oriented System Design Interviews
Using LeetCode to prepare for job interviews is becoming increasingly insufficient and obsolete these days. Traditional SWE-1 jobs are decreasing. Software companies more frequently ask design questions even to junior engineering candidates, effectively wanting all software engineers to be at least SWE-2 (experienced IC) or higher.
There are two types of design questions:
- Object-oriented design focuses on complex design patterns within different classes on a single computer.
- Distributed system design focuses on complex design patterns of services that run on different processes on many computers.
They may solve similar problems, such as booking a hotel or matching a driver with a rider, but at different scales. Due to their similarity, it's important for the candidate to:
- Clarify the requirements: Who are the users? What operations will they perform?
- Provide the design of data and their relationships. This can be in object-oriented code, database schema, or ER diagrams.
- Walk through interactions between different components.