Do Freshers Need System Design? (Mostly No — Here's When Yes)

System design is an SDE-2 skill — but a handful of product companies now sneak a lightweight HLD/LLD round into fresher loops. Here's the realistic scope.

Learn LLD basics, skip distributed systems

For freshers, focus on object-oriented design (Parking Lot, LRU Cache) and SOLID. Full distributed HLD (sharding, consensus) is rarely expected at entry level.