Why big system design is bad for learning

btw, enrollments are open for my august sys design cohort, filled with no-fluff and highly practical engineering discussions aimed at making you a better engineer - arpitbhayani.me/course 

I once spent 45 minutes at an interview developing 'Netflix'. We ended up naming the microservices but never addressed data consistency or failure management. Completely missed the purpose. Focused problems > fancy product names.

Absolutely agree! 🙌 Too often, we get caught up in trying to architect the entire universe in one go and miss the real beauty of system design: digging into the why behind choices, the trade-offs, and the engineering nuances. Thanks for calling this out - scale is not about size, it is about depth!

Unfortunately, the current interview trends is to design "stripe", "quora" in one hour and satisfy the interviewer ego instead of solving / designing a small portion of large system.

Hope more interviewers can see and understand this before asking another candidate to design Amazon😛

Absolutely on point.

Reminds me of the time I was asked to design Netflix in one of my interviews.😀

Arpit Bhayani Depth brings more excitement to someone starting new on a path whereas breadth may leave them disheartened. As we progress, we start to automatically become comfortable with breadth as transfer learning starts to play it's part.

For that even the interviewer should be ready to spend his brain juices and has to be willing to be corrected. How many interviewers will swallow the pride and treat it as purely design discussion. Devil lies in the details but not everyone is ready to confront the devil.

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