Does system design interview involve coding?

Key Areas of Focus in System Design Interviews:

• Architecture: Designing the overall structure of the system, including how components like databases, APIs, servers, and load balancers interact.
• Scalability: Planning for how the system will handle growth in users and data.
• Data Management: Discussing how data is stored, retrieved, and replicated, including choices like SQL vs. NoSQL.
• Trade-offs: Balancing factors such as performance, cost, consistency, and availability (often in reference to the CAP theorem).
• Failure and Reliability: Explaining how the system will handle failures and ensure reliability and uptime.

Exceptions:

While you’re not expected to write code, you might be asked to sketch out a basic algorithm for how certain parts of the system work or describe the logic behind key components, such as how you would partition a database or implement caching. But this doesn’t typically involve writing detailed, functional code.

Final Thoughts:

System design interviews are more about understanding and designing architecture at a high level, not writing code. If you're looking to prepare for this type of interview, courses like Grokking the System Design Interview can provide helpful insights and practice scenarios.