Interview archetypes
Six styles of interviewer, described by behaviour rather than by company. Pick one and problem pages, timed mocks and the follow-up blitz favour the follow-up questions that interviewer would ask.
Questions every decision. Keeps asking "why not the other way?"
You change your answer the moment they push. If you switch from a queue to a direct call because they raised an eyebrow, you have told them the first answer was memorised.
What does this cost per month? Is there a cheaper way? Who gets paged at 3am?
You have no idea which line item dominates. If you cannot say whether bandwidth, storage or compute is the biggest cost, you have not connected your design to your estimates.
Multiplies your traffic, adds celebrity users and hot keys, kills a region.
"It scales horizontally." Some part never does, and not naming it means you have not looked.
Picks one hard subproblem and stays inside it for thirty minutes.
You run out of depth after two levels. You can say "we would use a cache" and "cache-aside", and then nothing.
Changes the requirements halfway through, on purpose.
You start over. Most scope changes affect one part of a design, and rebuilding everything shows you cannot see the boundaries.
Imposes a hard limit up front and grades everything within it.
You design the normal system and then bolt the constraint on at the end. It has to shape the design from Stage 1.