GeneralBackendHigh signal
Capacity Estimation
Also written as Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation
Roughly calculating a system's expected scale — storage needed, requests per second, bandwidth — early in a design, to sanity-check whether an approach can actually work before building it.
Think of it like
Like a caterer roughly estimating how much food a wedding needs from the guest count, before finalizing the actual menu and shopping list.
Junior or senior?
Junior sounds like
Cites a memorized formula without reasoning through it.
Senior sounds like
Can walk through estimating storage or traffic from a rough sense of user count, out loud.
Ask them
“Walk me through how you'd estimate the storage a new feature would need, just from a rough sense of user count and usage.”