Re:What to do if you get a question you've already seen in a...
by vanusa on Saturday January 29, 2022 @11:37AM
(#30127684)
Interviewers aren't looking for you to get the right answer, they are looking at how you think about the problem, how you communicate your solution, and what trade offs you make.
That's what everyone wants to believe. But in reality, about 90 percent of the time, it basically is all about just getting the right answer within the given (patently unrealistic) timeframe. "How you communicate" is at best gravy. But if you don't solve that Two Sum problem in linear time in 27 minutes or less -- you're flushed, gone... and "don't let the door hit ya."
For example, people who have seen the problem before will sometimes more or less remember the solution but not how they got there. Then the interviewer asks some questions about the solution which they really don't know how to answer and that looks bad.
> You want to be sure you walk your interviewer through your thinking even if you know the right solution out of the gate. Spend time analyzing the problem, really quickly coming up with a brute force solution, and then showing how you can optimize it to the real solution. This will show a clear line of thinking which is what the interviewer is looking for. As long as you have structure in how you solve interview problems you shouldn't have an issue.
This is the key point. Interviewers aren't looking for you to get the right answer, they are looking at how you think about the problem, how you communicate your solution, and what trade offs you make. If you just blurt out the correct answer without context, you probably haven't demonstrated the things they are looking for.