I will read this as it seems really good. However, it always feels like a catch-22 problem to me, in the sense that, if you've never worked at a large company before, you can't claim to have truly used or understood large scale systems properly to work on them or design them in production.

I got rejected from a large tech company after failing system design and this was exactly their reasoning: "you seem to know the concepts and the theory really well, but, it was obvious to the interviewers that you lack the real world experience and hiring you would be a risk".

Obviously I... knew or at least tried to know the theory because I PREPARED. I read books, articles, practiced mock problems, watched YouTube for a few weeks, etc, etc. I just tried to "drill" the knowledge that was not there into my brain for the purpose of passing the interview. I guess that's what a lot of people do.

So yeah, it left me really down for a few months and feeling bad about myself and like the world sucks. So, how are you all out there "faking it till you make it" in a convincing way?

Because I bet that no engineers at a FAANG will alone design a full scale system on their own ever, so I doubt the usefulness of the "signal" these interviews give, but, ofc, that's just me, someone who prepared for months and failed