System Design Interviews

For some reason I honestly don’t understand, system design has become a mandatory step in architect interviews.
Feels like it comes from a popular misconception: architects produce diagrams 🤦‍♂️

Context:
– usually lasts 1–1.5 hours
– 15 minutes: candidate clarifies requirements
– 15 minutes: candidate presents a solution
– 30–60 minutes: candidate “designs” the solution (let’s be real, they don’t design anything, they just draw something)

I consider these interviews useless, even harmful.

1. In 30–60 minutes, candidates produce low-quality decisions.
There’s simply not enough time to think things through. Architecture isn’t about best practices and patterns. It’s about pragmatism and efficiency.

2. The reasoning behind decisions is spoken, not captured, and often gets lost.
– The candidate forgets what they said
– Important nuances get lost because reasoning is just “in the air”
– The interviewer zones out while waiting and misses the reasoning entirely

3. The interviewer can’t really validate anything.
– They may disagree, but don’t have time to fully challenge it
– They may not understand the solution, but don’t have time to clarify
– At best, they can tell whether the candidate can say something reasonable and produce a mediocre solution in 30–60 minutes

4. Drawing diagrams is one of the least important parts of an architect’s job.
An experienced architect can sketch a solution of any complexity in an hour. I even ran a poll among experienced architects, and most spend less than 10% of their time drawing diagrams.

5. AI can draw diagrams as well as inexperienced architects
(which, statistically, are the majority being hired, no offense).
It still performs worse than experienced architects because it can’t focus on what matters and simplify properly. But here’s the key point: you’ll never filter out a strong architect with system design interviews anyway.
So what’s the point?

So what is system design actually good for?
It shows the candidate that your company has weak architecture processes, low operational efficiency, and low architectural maturity.

What should you evaluate instead for an architect role?
The core responsibility of an architect is making architectural decisions.
That’s the skill you need to assess.

Give a small problem and see how the candidate approaches it
(a few questions, 5–10 minutes to think).

I like giving architectural puzzles.
In 5 minutes, you can clearly see how a person thinks and solves problems.

“You criticize system design because you can’t pass it.”
In 17 years, I’ve never failed a single system design interview.

What do you think about system design?