Interviews on Object-Oriented Design (OOD) are becoming increasingly popular in technical hiring. Large companies, such as Amazon, Bloomberg, and Uber, use them as a practical programming exercise to assess a candidate’s ability to build logical, maintainable systems and apply object-oriented design principles and patterns. Unlike algorithmic tasks, where a single optimal answer is important, OOD interviews leave room for creativity: the same task can be solved in different ways. Questions can pertain to real-world systems (for example, "Parking Lot" or "Vending Machine") or more abstract tasks ("File Search in Unix" or "Tic-Tac-Toe"). Companies use these interviews to find developers capable of writing clean, understandable, and scalable code quickly. Successfully passing an OOD interview often distinguishes mid-level and senior engineers, demonstrating their mature design skills.
Object-Oriented Design Interview1
What interviewers assess:
- Product Thinking - the ability to translate real requirements into software solutions.
- System Thinking - breaking down a complex system into subsystems and components.
- Decision Making - balancing flexibility and simplicity in design.
- Code Quality - clean and maintainable implementation.
- Knowledge of OOP - application of SOLID principles and design patterns.
- Communication - clear explanation of ideas and reasoning behind choices.
The course will help you:
- understand the structure of OOD interviews and how they differ from algorithmic ones;
- learn key principles, patterns, and approaches;
- go through step-by-step analysis of example tasks;
- practice with typical cases (from "Parking" to "Elevator System").
The main focus is on explanations so that you not only learn the solutions but also learn to independently build designs and feel confident in interviews.
Additional
Here is a text-based course. Please download the archive to access the materials
About the Author: ByteByteGo (Alex Xu)
ByteByteGo is the technical-content platform of Alex Xu — the author of the widely-read System Design Interview book series (Volumes I and II), which has anchored the system-design-interview prep market alongside Design Gurus. The platform extends Alex's books into a video course catalog plus the popular ByteByteGo newsletter on engineering-system topics.
The course catalog covers system design at all levels — from the foundational primitives (load balancers, caches, databases, queues) through the architectures of well-known systems (the YouTube serving stack, the Twitter timeline, the Uber dispatch system). The teaching style favours visual diagrams and pattern-based reasoning rather than memorising specific architectures.
The CourseFlix listing under this source carries 6 ByteByteGo courses spanning that range. Material is paid; ByteByteGo runs on per-course or membership pricing on the original platform. Courses are aimed at engineers preparing for senior-level system-design interviews or doing real architectural work on production systems.
Related courses
-
NewGrokking Advanced Coding Patterns for Interviews
By: Design GurusCourse on advanced programming patterns for successful completion of technical interviews. Includes strategies, algorithms, and practical examples. -
Updated 10mo agoMaster The Data Structures And Algorithms Interview
By: Alex ChiouAlgorithms and Data Structures (DSA) - these words scare many engineers. You might try to avoid them, but LeetCode and interview tasks will catch up eventually.2 hours 51 minutes 25 seconds -
Updated 1mo agoGrokking the Object Oriented Design Interview
By: Design GurusPrepare for an interview on object-oriented design with the course from Design Gurus. Study examples and case studies from Google, Facebook, Microsoft