I failed to practice answering questions that I already knew the answer to. I also think the interviewers style had something to do with putting me off balance (it became adversarial after I pointed out this was just alien dictionary, I probably would have had a better result pretending not to have seen the problem before). Or maybe that’s just how things are at Amazon?

My Google and Facebook interviews went much better in comparison. None of their questions were top ten LeetCode ones.

> I failed to practice answering questions that I already knew the answer to.

You failed for the same reason you would have failed if you had never heard the problem before. Knowing the answer has nothing to do with why you were dinged.

The interviewer turned really adversarial when I told her this was a common LeetCode problem. I guess you really had to have been there. Alien dictionary isn’t that hard otherwise, if I were allowed to work through it rather than explaining how it worked, things would have gone much better.