google system design interview questions are not what the youtube videos tell you!

been through the loop twice, once got to team match, once got flat out rejected. every time ppl ask me how to prep for google interview system design questions i tell them the same thing: you’re overengineering it.

i see folks grinding “design instagram” or “design twitter” and memorizing how netflix shards video metadata. cool. but that’s not what they’re testing for. they want to see if you can take a messy vague problem and make it boring, stable, and usable.

they gave me a prompt like “how would you enable partial rollout of a feature in a distributed backend system.” i started talking about flags, metrics, rollback paths interviewer nodded. then they asked “how would you convince teams to adopt it” and i blanked. didn’t expect the org part to be the hard bit.

i’ve seen other google system design interview questions float around like “rate limiter,” “real-time chat,” or “distributed queue.” none of these are hard if you keep it simple. the problem is most of us try to be too clever. i’ve literally seen folks draw 9 layers of infra and miss the part about data retention or failure recovery.

pro tip: they care more about how you break the problem down than how shiny your boxes are. like, can you talk through read vs write scaling? can you say what you’d monitor in prod? how would you alert the oncall? even basic stuff like “what happens if redis goes down” most ppl handwave.

also yeah it’s 45 mins. you can’t solve the world. pick one or two parts of the system and go deep.

i looked at a bunch of google system design questions on glassdoor and blind, and they helped to get patterns, but honestly nothing beats practicing out loud with someone who can roast your logic.

i didn’t get the offer this time. feedback was “strong technical, unclear prioritization.” which honestly… fair. said yes to too much, didn’t clarify enough.

anyway. hope that’s helpful. if you’re prepping, don’t memorize. just get good at thinking slowly and talking clearly.