Agreed 100%. I spent ten years at Google, got promoted three times, never did any distributed systems stuff. When I decided to leave about 18 months ago, trying to cram for these interviews and memorize how WhatsApp works was the worst part of interviewing. But I jumped through the hoop and got a couple offers, neither of which involve doing distributed systems work. Those were definitely my weakest interviews, and in the case of my current employer, I literally said to my HM, "I've never done this kind of work, and I'm not going to shine in these interviews. Here's the kind of work I have done and I'd love to talk to you about it instead." I still had to do the sys design interview, but I think maybe that helped get it down weighted?
I never did any system design, and got offers at Meta and Google (I even aced the system design at Google). It's not a very discriminating interview I believe. And I found it quite fun to prepare.
Quite a lot. I read many times "Designing data-intensive applications" which I highly recommend. There's a book called "system design interview" I believe, that is a summary of the most typical designs. There are also a bunch of videos on youtube. I read some research papers of classical designs. I played with some typical components, such as nosql dbs. I even implemented some prototypes.
Not on the top of my head, but they are usually cited in the blogs or video that present some classic systems. And "designing data intensive applications" has all the references. That being said, I don't think it's worth getting that deep for system design interview preparation unless you're already quite advanced. Retrospectively, I think I spent too much time on advanced material, overestimating what was required for this roles.
