## The Interview Arms Race Nobody Talks About

The Interview Arms Race Nobody Talks About Last spring I bombed a system design round at a mid-sized fintech company. Not because I didn't know distributed systems — I'd been building them for six years. I bombed it because the interviewer asked me to walk through a rate limiter design, and I started rambling about token buckets when they clearly wanted me to anchor on their specific use case first. Afterward, I found out three other candidates had nailed that exact framing. Two of them had used