Crushing the Technical Interview: Interviewer's Guide cover
Coming October 8, 2026

Crushing the Technical Interview

Interviewer's Guide

Most system design interviews are broken, and the problem is not the candidates. It is the interviewers, not because they lack technical ability, but because they were handed a prompt and pointed at a candidate with no shared criteria, no calibrated standard, and no training in how to evaluate what they were seeing.

Written by a director of enterprise architecture with 30 years of experience in software and system design, this is a complete operating manual for conducting rigorous, consistent, and fair technical interviews, written for the people running them, not the people taking them.

This title releases October 8, 2026. Sign up for updates or check back here for purchase links.

Part One: The Foundation

It names and diagnoses the six failure modes that corrupt evaluations, including the Expert Trap, Recency Bias, the Confidence Fallacy, Solution Anchoring, the Collaboration Gap, and Calibration Drift, and gives you structural remedies for each.

Part Two: Technical Depth

Technical depth across every major system design domain: scalability, availability, performance, observability, data modeling, and distributed systems. For each domain, you get targeted probe questions, calibrated model answers at three seniority levels, and guidance on what separates surface knowledge from genuine mastery.

Part Three: Five Worked Problems

Five fully worked canonical design problems, including a rate limiter, an event sourcing system with CQRS, a distributed configuration service, a real-time collaborative document editor, and a URL shortener, each with calibration notes, common errors, and hire/no-hire guidance at every level.

Field Reference

The book closes with a field reference containing the evaluation rubric, a prompt library, and a probe library you can use immediately, plus calibration scenarios for panel training and chapters on bias, equity, and candidate experience.

If you conduct system design interviews, manage people who do, or are building a technical hiring program from the ground up, this is the reference you've been missing.