I consider the couple years I built systems in Erlang to be fundamental for me. It's affected, for better and worse, my entire approach to system design, at every level. It's meant the stuff I or (now that I'm in management) my teams tend to write is incredibly resilient (compared with the other teams in the department), but also meant that I have a really hard time with any Silicon Valley interview.
I 100% agree with this, but would add that actually in my case I feel like it has helped with Silicon Valley style interviews. Architecting a single BEAM application involves a lot of the same thought processes that go into designing any resilient distributed system so I have felt well prepared for any design questions. Additionally, being forced to write algorithms with immutable data structures, recursion and explicit state prepares you ridiculously well for solving the graph questions that FAANG like to give in interviews.
Specific design questions, yes. The "45 minute to design a system" ones, not so much. The hard part of those is not getting too bogged down in details, and this just means I have one more, extremely important, likely unappreciated by the interviewer, detail I can get bogged down in: what happens when things fail.
What happens when things fail is an absolutely critical part of design / architecture. It's disappointing that interviewers works consider that an unimportant detail.
Again, 45 minutes for system design interviews. I could go on a long diatribe of why the FAANG interview strategies are flawed, but everyone knows that, FAANG interviewers included. You play the game if you want the role; if you're just, you know, good, and don't want to learn to play the game, then you're an acceptable false negative.
I consider the couple years I built systems in Erlang to be fundamental for me. It's affected, for better and worse, my entire approach to system design, at every level. It's meant the stuff I or (now that I'm in management) my teams tend to write is incredibly resilient (compared with the other teams in the department), but also meant that I have a really hard time with any Silicon Valley interview.