That would fall into the 2%. At least in my experience, the 98% number is in the ballpark. If you are working on backend services in big tech, what you are building is quite different than most software systems.

This comment is a prime example of how the non-technical founder understands the world.

Proprietary systems are company IP. Talking about the design of the system is protected by the NDA, which the exercise described above is asking the candidate to do.

You hire for the skills to develop your own proprietary system. The employer doesn't own the skill. The employer owns anything those skills produced for the employer.

You wouldn't want your employees giving the recipe to your secret sauce away to your competitor, right? That's what everyone is talking about.

I think they mean something like:

[Client]->[Cloudfront]->[Load balancer]->[ECS service in a VPC]->[RDS/other internal systems]

* Replace the above with any other cloud provider, or just commercial/open source tools that do the same job running in a VPS or whatever *

I can't see how any of this could be claimed to be protected by an NDA or similar, as this is just a highly standard architecture.

If you work on a proprietary system that has a specific architecture just don't mention that of course. I think the above allows us to discuss things pretty well, talk about introducing caching, why each layer is there, TLS termination, authentication/authorization concerns and implementation, secrets management...

> you hire for the skills to develop your own proprietary system. The employer doesn't own the skill.

Oh OK! Then I guess a good engineer should be able to make it through a standard systems design interview process, and shouldn't complain about it!

I am glad you agree that it is totally fine to ask engineers these types of questions, and there is no problems with NDAs that will get in the way of them demonstrating basic skills!

That was my point entirely.

Yes, I totally agree that an engineer should be able to go through a tech interview.

And the engineers who are complaining about the fact that they have an NDA are wrong, and they should stop complaining.

If the NDA is so significant that it prevents you from doing an interview, then you are worthless as an employee anyway. But really that should never happen.

If your employees go to a competitor and make a secret sauce that tastes the same, how do you judge what is the source of knowledge?

They can have used their skills to come up with a recipe that tastes the same because the requirements led to that outcome, or they simply copied your recipe.

If somebody from OpenAI goes to a competitor and creates something like ChatGPT, where is the line crossed that shows that company IP is transferred? The employee knows how to create the system because he knows how ChatGPT works. If he recreates a similar system but doesn't say that it is a copy of ChatGPT, is that applied skill or is that a violation of the NDA?

If it is a violation, how could he forget the structure of ChatGPT to genuinely come up with a new structure?

Legislatures write rules, people enter contracts, sue for perceived breaches and courts rule on these disputes. People then adjust behaviors to get desired results without incurring legal liabilities. Results vary across jurisdiction. Such questions can't be answered in principle. California famously won't enforce non-compete clauses, and that apparently helps innovation. China caught up industrially with the West within one generation by flouting every IP rule we have here. On the other side of the debate, patent trolls...

The flaw in this argument is assuming that you could do a good job of diagramming a system without describing the use cases of the system. My web dev skills are not proprietary, but the processes and systems I have worked on are.

The engineering knowledge isn’t under NDA but there’s no way I could fill an hour long interview about the systems I work on without getting into enough specifics about our business processes to violate NDA.

If I were asked a question like this I’d wonder if I were being tested to see how loose-lipped I am with sensitive information.

I get it...I tend to think in point solutions as well, but getting stuck there is the problem and moving past that to abstract point solutions into a systems design that talks about the architecture of the solution and the 'why' behind the design choices is what gets you out of NDA-land. None of that stuff the next level up is proprietary. Specifically how it was applied in that problem domain is.

There's a difference between being asked to design a system of the interviewers choice and being asked to design a system you know deeply.

It’s the difference between being asked “how would you design a Twitter clone?” and “How did you design [current employer’ssystem]?”

The first is generic (unless you happen to be a current Twitter employee). No NDA impact. The second is asking you to reveal details of a proprietary system covered by NDA (or if you’re a Fed contractor, covered by various classification laws).

What you learned isn’t the same as what was built.

But you learned how to build things so….

Well yes, I hope someone learned how to build many things not just recreate an architecture they’ve seen before.

What on earth are you even talking about? I can't build anything, because the stuff I have built is covered by NDA?