Technical interviews are rarely about knowing everything—they’re about showing how you think under constraints. If you tend to freeze, ramble, or jump straight into code, try this repeatable approach that keeps you calm and makes your process easy to evaluate.
Before touching code, lock down the problem:
Pro tip: Interviewers often expect questions. Clarifying shows maturity, not weakness.
Outline your approach out loud:
If you’re stuck, use this prompt: “What’s the simplest brute force, and what makes it slow?” That usually reveals the optimization.
Write code in chunks you can reason about:
Common pitfall: coding the entire solution then testing at the end. Instead, build progressively so bugs don’t compound.
Always do a quick dry run:
If you find a bug, narrate calmly: “I see the issue—here’s the fix and why.” Debugging is a signal of real engineering skill.
Use this exact sentence to buy time and reset:
“Let me confirm constraints and outline a straightforward approach before optimizing.”
It communicates control and gives your brain a structured next step.
What part of the technical interview trips you up most—clarifying, coming up with the approach, writing bug-free code, or explaining complexity—and what’s one example problem where that happened?
This is a solid framework—especially the “Clarify → Plan → Execute → Validate” cadence. One extra tweak that helps people who blank out: make the **Pl...
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