Technical interviews can feel like a roulette wheel—until you treat them like a skill you can practice deliberately. If you’ve been grinding problems but still freezing in interviews, try shifting from “more questions” to “better process.” Here’s a repeatable game plan you can use in live coding, whiteboard, and most technical assessments.
1) Use a 4-step problem-solving script (every single time)
Interviewers aren’t only scoring correctness—they’re scoring how you think. Practice narrating this structure:
- Clarify: Restate the problem, confirm inputs/outputs, constraints, edge cases.
- Plan: Propose 1–2 approaches, pick one, state time/space complexity.
- Implement: Write clean code with consistent naming and small helper functions.
- Verify: Walk through a test case + an edge case; mention complexity again.
Tip: If you blank, go back to the script. It’s your “reset button.”
2) Master patterns, not problems
Many questions are just variations of the same few ideas. Build your study plan around patterns like:
- Two pointers / sliding window (arrays, strings)
- Hash maps for counting/lookup (anagrams, frequency, prefix sums)
- Binary search on answer (min/max feasible)
- BFS/DFS (graphs, grids, trees)
- Dynamic programming basics (1D DP, knapsack-style)
For each pattern, keep a short note:
- When to use it
- Typical pitfalls
- A “template” you can adapt
3) Communicate like a strong collaborator
Great candidates make the interviewer’s job easy.
- Say what you’re doing before you do it: “I’m going to build a map of counts first…”
- Call out tradeoffs: “This is O(n) time with O(n) space; we could optimize space if…”
- Handle mistakes calmly: “I think there’s an off-by-one; let me trace indices.”
In pair-programming style interviews, this matters as much as raw coding speed.
4) Create a debugging routine you can execute under pressure
When your solution fails:
- Re-run the failing case manually
- Check initialization and boundaries
- Confirm loop invariants (“what must always be true here?”)
- Add a tiny print/trace (if allowed) or do a verbal trace
Bonus: Practice with intentionally broken code to train this muscle.
5) Build a realistic practice loop
Instead of 2 hours of casual solving, do:
- 30–40 min timed (one problem)
- 10 min review (what pattern, what mistake)
- 10 min redo (write a cleaner version from scratch)
This builds speed, clarity, and confidence.
If you adopted just one upgrade to your prep this week—better patterns, better communication, or a stronger script—which would move the needle most for you, and why?