It is a proxy or how good you are at other development tasks. I think it's a bad proxy. Mostly because I've read and studied CLRS at school. And I don't use the fun parts much in the wild. I'm also not expected to be able to recall things that you can look up.
One 'slightly' shameful things I noted about myself reading that list of system design interview questions is that I actually don't use most of those systems or know their features well enough. Other than YT of course.
I feel like the simpler interview process would be to just take a person and do a hand wavy system design interview. Then if they pass, hire em on probation for 2 months and slam them with work. They get paid, you maybe get a feel for them.
They sink or swim. You keep em' or toss em' away at the end of the two months.
That approach would work for a startup, but not when you’re hiring 100s of engineers on a weekly basis. Not to mention the amount of bias that approach will introduce. At least with the current approach, you know exactly what the criteria is to land the gig.
Hmm.. this is how I got hired last year. I told the employer that I wanted to test them and to get me a short term project we could use to determine if company/me are a good match.
One 'slightly' shameful things I noted about myself reading that list of system design interview questions is that I actually don't use most of those systems or know their features well enough. Other than YT of course.
I feel like the simpler interview process would be to just take a person and do a hand wavy system design interview. Then if they pass, hire em on probation for 2 months and slam them with work. They get paid, you maybe get a feel for them.
They sink or swim. You keep em' or toss em' away at the end of the two months.