I am wondering what the view points here and wanted to see if people feel the same as I am feeling. I went through few interviews recently where I was asked system design questions. I did well in interviews (based on whether I got an offer or not) where the system design interviews were about systems where both (myself and the interviewer) had the same level of familiarity with the system under design (I will elaborate on that a little later). And I did not do well in interviews (there were specific feedback given to me around how I did in system design interview along with rejection, general feeling after I finished the interview) where the interviewer had a better understanding of the system under design.

Lets take few examples:

[positive] interviewed with a fintech company and they asked me to design airbnb

[positive] interviewed with an enterprise SaS and they asked me to design multi-player chess game

[positive] interviewed with a collaboration software and they asked me to design instagram like website.

[negative] interviewed with a fintech company (app-only bank) and they asked me to design check clearing system

[negative] interviewed with a hedge fund / trading software company and they asked me to design APIs which can fetch the current stock price or the historical stock price for a security

My personal viewpoint is that when the system under design is familiar to the interviewer, which they have spent months and years to design (through trial and error, through discussions with teams etc), it immediately puts the interviewee at disadvantage since the interviewee probably knows about the domain very little compared to the interviewee.

However on the other side, may be I hold this opinion because I got rejected from such interviews (sour grapes).

So want to know the viewpoint of others and this community is probably better than chatting with my other friends who will probably confirm my bias.