Would you hire someone who memorizes the System Design Interview book?

> my colleague gave *a common question that was found in System Design interview*. The candidate seems to be able to give a *perfect answer*

Do you see the irony? Asking a “leetcode” question expecting an “non-leetcode” answer. Canned questions deserve canned answers. That’s what interviews have devolve into.

You get what you measure. You want better experience and person, have a conversation not an interrogation.

Yes, definitely. What's the alternative - hire people who don't answer your question correctly? Only hire people who can give a good answer that's different from the book? Hire people who have read the book but are good at pretending that they haven't? None of those make sense.

If someone giving you a correct answer is concerning, just change the questions that you use. But it would be ridiculous to penalize people for preparing.

Seems he/she read the manual and memorised it. Hell that is a huge green flag for me. If they can keep that manual in their head, then perhaps the GOF or other books too. Snap them up.

Depends on the level.

If it's an early career engineer (< 4 YOE) then sure fine. You can't expect someone with that kind of experience to have in-depth knowledge on system design.

If it's senior+ then yeah you might expect more. Especially if it's around something the engineer has worked with before.

You are getting what you asked for. If that's not what you need, ask for something else. There's nothing wrong in a candidate learning system design from a system design book.

Yes of course. Are you qualified to be interviewing?