[rossenberg79]

My main problem with programming interviews is that I can’t use external references to do them, which is totally not how I work. Even if I know how to solve something off the top of my head, I generally do a search to make sure there aren’t better ways of doing something that I don’t know about, and also to build confidence in my chosen solution. This is how I have discovered most best practices over my career.

If I’m given a task to solve some weird algorithmic CS problem, the first step would be to go to google and research the problem. If it’s solved, I implement that solution.

When there is no solution, I will put pen to paper and work it out myself. But that could take an unpredictable amount of time, and doesn’t help if someone is constantly watching me work or forcing me to explain what I’m thinking, because I think much faster than I can explain, and some lines of thoughts lead to dead ends, which can make people grow impatient with pointless explanations of things that will never work.

Of course, in an interview you can’t just use Google to solve everything, because interviewers will snigger and say “tHiS gUy DoEsN’t KnOw sHiT”, never mind that this is probably how 99% of developers work given the amount of questions and code reuse that is out there. It’s just not realistic.