The technical interview
A technical interview is not an exam with a correct answer. It is a sample of what working with you would be like, compressed into forty-five minutes. Candidates who understand that pass with worse solutions than candidates who do not.
What to do
Understand the scorecard
Interviewers are usually rating problem-solving, coding, communication and, quietly, whether they would want you on their team. A working solution reached in silence often scores below a nearly-complete one reached out loud.
Practise thinking aloud, in English
This is the single highest-return habit and almost nobody practises it. Narrate your assumptions, your options and why you rejected one. It is uncomfortable for about two weeks and then it is normal.
Learn patterns, not problems
Two pointers, sliding window, hashing for lookup, breadth-first search, recursion with memoisation, sorting to reveal structure. Six patterns cover most of what you will be asked. Memorising two hundred problems does not.
Always state the brute force first
Say the obvious solution, give its complexity, then improve it. This shows range and buys thinking time. Jumping straight at a clever answer and stalling is the worst outcome in the room.
Do two mock interviews with a real person
Practising alone hides exactly the problems that fail you — silence, rambling, freezing. You need someone to sit opposite you and then tell you the truth.
What goes wrong
- Going quiet while thinking. To the interviewer, silence and being stuck look identical.
- Not asking clarifying questions. Ambiguity is deliberate; the question is part of the test.
- Writing code before agreeing on the approach, then having to discard it with ten minutes left.
- Apologising repeatedly. It reads as low confidence and it costs you time.
- Ignoring edge cases and testing. Saying "let me walk through an example" earns points almost every time.
Where to go next
Outside resources worth your time. We are not paid to list any of these, and each one is useful without paying for it.
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