Chapter Assessment: System Design at Staff Level

This review covers system design as a Staff engineer practices it. That means an agreed problem, written non-goals, stages started by triggers, the full cost of ownership, a migration across many teams, and a premortem. The bank holds 21 questions, and each attempt draws ten, so a second attempt covers different lessons. Most questions ask for a decision at the marketplace rather than a definition. Several ask you to work a number from the lessons. Before you start, know why turning retries off would not fix the double runs