10 years ago at Facebook we had a systems design interview question called "botnet crawl" where the set up that I'd give would be:
I'm an entrepreneur who is going to get rich selling printed copies of Wikipedia. I'll pay you to fetch the content for me to print. You get 1000 compromised machines to use. Crawl Wikipedia and give me the data. Go.
Some candidates would (rightfully) point out that the entirety is available as an archive, so for "interviewing purposes" we'd have to ignore that fact.
If it went well, you would pivot back and forth: OK, you wrote a distributed crawler. Wikipedia hires you you to block it. What do you do? This cat and mouse game goes on indefinitely.
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10 years ago at Facebook we had a systems design interview question called "botnet crawl" where the set up that I'd give would be:
I'm an entrepreneur who is going to get rich selling printed copies of Wikipedia. I'll pay you to fetch the content for me to print. You get 1000 compromised machines to use. Crawl Wikipedia and give me the data. Go.
Some candidates would (rightfully) point out that the entirety is available as an archive, so for "interviewing purposes" we'd have to ignore that fact.
If it went well, you would pivot back and forth: OK, you wrote a distributed crawler. Wikipedia hires you you to block it. What do you do? This cat and mouse game goes on indefinitely.