Yup, exactly this. The easiest way to weed out bad candidates is to listen to all the buzzwords they rattle out and ask them to explain a single one and how it is relevant to their design.
My first instruction to candidates always is – only talk about things you know. If your system design interview prep book told you that you should use time series databases for a certain category of questions but you don't actually know how they work, you will be screwed by trying to incorporate them in your design. Just use MySQL instead and tell me its pros and cons for this use case.
My first instruction to candidates always is – only talk about things you know. If your system design interview prep book told you that you should use time series databases for a certain category of questions but you don't actually know how they work, you will be screwed by trying to incorporate them in your design. Just use MySQL instead and tell me its pros and cons for this use case.