Thoughts on Live Coding Interviews

nwillc
Level Up Coding
Published in
3 min readJun 17, 2021

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Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Having been on both sides of live coding interviews, most recently more on the interviewer’s side, I wanted to share some thoughts.

Knowing Your Stuff

I think to some degree most of us suffer from a bit of the imposter syndrome in interviews. We want to make sure we appear to know our stuff. There are a lot of discussions out there about how to study and prepare for technical interviews, even ones tailored to specific hiring companies. I’ve fallen into that anxiety trap myself, boning up on well know interview algorithmic questions hoping not to be caught off guard.

Here’s the thing, the mindset that comes with that sort of preparation is more harmful than the benefits of the preparation.

Downside of Preparation

A live coding interview for a decent role will likely not be geared towards seeing if you already know the solution to some classic problem. A good interview for a good role will most likely be designed to see how you work through a problem. Sure the process is about solving the problem, but more importantly, the goal is to evaluate your analytic abilities. Even if you immediately spew out a canned response that is awesome, a good interviewer will just pivot the question in some new direction, maybe even a nonsensical one, to see how you analyze that.

Rote preparation has major downsides. First, if you just blast out a solution you’ve not given them what they actually wanted, the ability to get a feeling for how you work things through. Second, and this is big, you’ll invariably develop a solution bias. If you practice for a week with a hammer you’ll want to solve every problem as if it was a nail. If you bone up on tree traversals and sorting algorithms you’ll look at every problem as something that needs to be represented by a tree and then sorted. Not only may you be totally wrong, but you may find it hard to let go of that bias even when the glass slipper clearly doesn’t fit.

What’s Good Preparation?

  • Brush up on your basic problem analysis skills. Remind yourself to read and parse the problem presented to you. Grab some random coder challenges and read through them. Pick out the salient points, look for the facts that give clues, if…

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Graybeard code monkey, started on an Apple IIe, got a CS degree in the 80’s, and coded my way through C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Kotlin — and now Go.