This is an Australian payments company. Their dev team is mainly based in Singapore.
When HR reached out, they picked a really late time slot to schedule things. Then for the phone screen, they booked me in for the system design round on Sunday night at 9pm.
HR told me they use Whimsical for the whiteboard. But then it turned out the interviewer's team doesn't actually have a fixed whiteboard tool — I could use whatever I was familiar with, and I wasn't given a link, so I just found one on the spot.
The question was to design Ticketmaster. Since it was a system I had studied before, I walked through every step's details and tradeoffs, but the interviewer still wasn't satisfied. He wouldn't say what the actual problem was — he just kept asking, do you think this will work well? I asked several times whether he meant some specific consideration, and he would just go silent, completely uncooperative. At that point I basically understood he didn't want to pass me.
System design interviews really come down to chemistry. Whether you actually perform well is secondary — whether you and the interviewer click matters more. I once did a system design interview at another company that was pure conversation with no diagrams at all, and the feedback was very well...
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