This may be good advice for programmers that learned in an academic setting, but as someone that taught themselves this would drive me nuts. I still struggle with abstract problem solving in problems that I haven't solved before. A lot of algorithm based interviews I'll totally flunk the first time around. Depending on the interviewers behavior I've either bailed out from there or tried to learn something.

More helpful is backing up and framing the problem to be less abstract. When learning to code, we're learning new ways to represent things that we likely already intuitively know. In that way, you're teaching expression. The two are taught very differently, imo.