[Mongoose]

I think this is a good question, but that it falls prey to the same conceit that befalls those who claim they could "build Twitter in a weekend". A picture-perfect sketch of a system can illustrate one's knowledge of patterns and off-the-shelf solutions, but it won't cover the things that get in the way of a team building their way towards product/market fit.

You could lead with this question and then jump in with hypothetical roadblocks to see how the candidate reacts.

Ex:

- "A network of microservices _would_ be a clean way to implement this. How would you foresee the operational burden of this impacting a small team?" - "Imagine that you build this and it works well, but the product it powers ends up not resonating with customers. The team now wants to pivot to X. What changes would you make to the system to address this new problem space?"

[humanrebar]

> it falls prey to the same conceit that befalls those who claim they could "build Twitter in a weekend"

A good answer would account for the fact that our initial approach to big projects tends to differ quite a bit from what the the end result is. Agility of architectural design is generally underrated in my experience.