What is an Anti-Pattern? Can you name a few? (God Object, Spaghetti Code, Golden Hammer)
Anti-Patterns
An anti-pattern is a commonly recurring solution or practice that appears useful initially but tends to create significant problems when applied inappropriately. Anti-patterns are not simply 'bad code'; they are recognizable patterns of poor design or implementation that repeatedly lead to maintainability, reliability or scalability problems.
- 1
God Object: one class knows or does far too much.
- 2
Spaghetti Code: tangled control flow and dependencies make behavior difficult to understand.
- 3
Golden Hammer: using one familiar technology or pattern for every problem.
- 4
Big Ball of Mud: architecture becomes highly coupled and difficult to reason about.
- 5
Premature Optimization: optimizing before identifying a meaningful performance bottleneck.
- 6
The correct response is to identify the underlying design problem rather than mechanically applying another pattern.
Scenario Questions
0-2 years experience
- 1You inherit a small module that has a single class handling UI rendering, data fetching, and logging. How would you refactor it to avoid a God Object?
- 2While writing a new feature, you notice the code has long, tangled conditional branches across many methods. What steps would you take to prevent spaghetti code in this context?
2-5 years experience
- 1During a code review, a teammate suggests using the same third‑party library for every new problem, even when it's not a good fit. How would you explain the risks of the Golden Hammer anti‑pattern to them?
- 2A recent bug was traced to a class that grew to 1500 lines and accessed many unrelated services. Walk me through how you'd diagnose and break down that God Object.
5-8 years experience
- 1Our microservice team is experiencing performance degradation because several services share a massive utility class that knows about many domains. How would you redesign to eliminate the God Object at scale?
- 2Legacy codebase has spaghetti code that makes automated testing impossible. What strategy would you use to incrementally refactor it while keeping the system stable?
8+ years experience
- 1We are planning a migration of a monolithic system that contains many Golden Hammer anti‑patterns, where a single framework is used for all processing pipelines. How would you approach the architectural redesign to avoid lock‑in and improve future extensibility?
- 2Across multiple product teams, a shared core library has become a God Object, accumulating responsibilities from different domains. What governance and design practices would you put in place to prevent this and to refactor existing code?
Follow-up Questions
- Can you walk me through a time you actually refactored a God Object?
- What metrics would you use to know the refactor succeeded?
- How would you convince stakeholders to invest in fixing a Golden Hammer situation?