It's a reasonable hurdle; an employee who previously signed an NDA (or any one, for that matter) needs to be able to design new systems without regurgitating verbatim parts of an old one under NDA.

So it's really not a big ask to navigate their own NDA and come up with something interesting to talk about at an interview.

I’m going to be way more strict about confidentiality with an interviewer I don’t know at all than with a trusted colleague. For all I know you get beers every week with the CTO of my current employer’s largest competitor.

Besides which there’s a way more interesting variation on the question, which is “how would you design our product?” Got that one in my last big tech interview and quite enjoyed it.

I suspect I got my current job in part by correctly predicting (in some detail) the product they were about to launch but hadn't announced yet.

It’s not a handicap. We’re not asking people to diagram their current systems. We don’t advocate for people to do that. You could just walk us through an HTTPS request and it would work, if you understood HTTPS requests well enough.

There’s no penalty. There are plenty of technologies that you’re working with that aren’t under NDA. We’re not asking you to diagram what you’re working on, we asking you to diagram something technical that you understand well.

Being able to use something you've intimately worked on as part of your job is a huge advantage since you're so familiar with it.

There have to be parts of what you work on that are not covered by NDA. Solving problems like this would be indicative of someone we would want on our team.

When I worked at Apple they made it abundantly clear that EVERYTHING was under NDA. Even things like “what version of the standard library do you use”. Or “what are computers for”. And that any minuscule transgression of the NDA would result in me Being immediately deported, divorced, and likely put in front of a firing squad.

That can’t tell you that you can’t explain how Kubernetes works or NGINX or the JVM. Any one of those things would be perfectly acceptable as a starting point.

The problem you're asking them to solve is a legal one, but you are not interviewing lawyers. I have never worked for a single employer that didn't require an NDA, and the NDAs are always written in a way that can be easily interpreted as "do not tell anyone anything about what you do here".

The question is not tell me what you do in your current job. The question is describe a technology or system that you understand well. Do you understand how the underlying systems work? You don’t have to tell me that your current company uses kubernetes to describe how kubernetes works. Your current job can’t keep you from describing how kubernetes works. Kubernetes is just an example here you could pick any technology that you’re comfortable with.

You're asking them to explain a technology they use while expecting them to tiptoe around what they're actually allowed to say about how they applied the technology. And you say this replaced your system design interviews. It sounds to me like someone explaining what Kubernetes is won't do nearly as well as someone who can explain in-depth how they applied Kubernetes to their job.

When I interviewed with apple they said pretty much everything they do is proprietary and considered secret. I imagine for some of these people working there for years it would be hard to avoid breaking nda

There’s no place where we are asking you to diagram the system that you’re working on. We ask you to diagram a system you understand well. Are you using messages queues, container orchestration, network components, cloud infrastructure, Java/rust/go/Python/etc.? Tell me about one of those components and how they connect together in theory vs the specifics of your system. Everyone who works in technology works with, mostly, complicated interconnected systems. The point of this exercise isn’t to design a system or tell me about a system that you’ve designed as much as it is about helping the team to understand the breadth and depth of your technology knowledge. Good engineers typically find creative ways help us understand their knowledge without disclosing NDA material.

I worked at apple in the past. It would be a violation to answer your questions.

I feel like I'm either losing my mind or people are being deliberately obtuse now.

He's not saying they ask you to give a full overview of the way Apple architects their systems, he's saying they ask you to explain how a basic Kubernetes deployment might look, or how you might go about setting up some kind of backup system, or literally any of a million different technical things that you might have knowledge of and interest in.

How could things like this possibly be under NDA? If you weren't able to use any of this knowledge, you would be completely crippled in your work.

You can’t tell me how HTTPS works because of your NDA?

You live in a world where most of those systems you describe are not covered by NDA. Not everyone does.

But, if you’re a web developer you should be able to diagram what happens when a browser makes a request

Ok yes because that’s colleges level material. The subject here is Staff Engineer (L6) interviewing. So that will require nearly all the demonstration of value to be of high level professional context.

But there’s lots of systems like this that you could diagram with arbitrary levels of detail without talking about NDAed systems

Nobody forced those people into that situation.

There's a lot of nobody in the context of interviewers making it expressly harder for those people to stop being that situation.

There's nothing 'unnecessary' about it. If you can't talk about technology in an interview for a software engineer, what else do you have to go on?