70% of Frontend engineers fails in the System design round

Reading the backend system interview books won't help you to clear your frontend system design round

I was recently discussing with a senior frontend engineer who was recently laid off and was looking for a referral.

We discussed how many interview rounds are asked of frontend engineers going for the SDE3+ roles.

While discussing he told me that he has been failing in the frontend system design round in the last 7 - 8 interviews and is breaking his morale.

I asked him how he prepares for the frontend system, he said that he watches YouTube videos on system design and reads Alex Xu’s system design book.

This is where he was going wrong, you cannot ace a frontend system design interview by reading about the backend. It is like saying Tiger and Lion both are the same.

A simple tip that you can follow to ace your frontend system design interview is to understand the nature of the application that has been asked to be designed.

Does it support SEO or not? the most important question that you should ask depending upon which your application design depends.

After which you can decide on the

- Rendering strategy
a. Client-side rendered (not great for SEO)
b. Server-side rendered (great for SEO)
c. Server-side generated (great for SEO and performance)
d. Incremental static regeneration (great for SEO and performance)

Once the rendering strategy is finalized, you can worry about the exchanging of data, session management, repo & code management, bundling, hosting, security, performance optimization, etc.

It is a vast topic and completely different from the backend. I am trying my best to cover it and publish the book by February. You can study from learnersbucket.com meanwhile.

Recently I started covering the web security topics on my blog, do check it out.

- Decoding and preventing the Cross-Site forgery (CSRF) attacks
- Understanding the Cross-Site scripting (XSS) attacks

Keep Hustling and Keep Learning!