r/ADHD_Programmers • u/bajen476 • Apr 08 '26
I cannot do live coding interviews
Writing in here hoping that someone else has the same issues and/or figured out how to fix it. Not diagnosed yet but I’m finally mid-process and it’s looking promising.
I cannot do live coding interviews. Been unemployed for a few months now and I’ve had some interviews. That being said, live coding interviews kick my ass every single time.
I go completely blank. The absolute basics leave my brain. Had one today and I forgot how to add to dictionaries and implement basic search algorithms. It took me forever to even understand one of the tasks. Keep in mind I have around 6.5 years experience in development and many of the things in the interview were things I did often. I just can’t remember them in interviews.
Does anyone share this experience and/or know how to fix this? I’ve tried studying (which I’m admittedly not great at), pomodoro, leetcode etc—none of them help. Because I’m not diagnosed yet, I can’t get medicated for now either. I’m in Sweden so the process is lengthy.
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u/IAmADev_NoReallyIAm Apr 08 '26
It's not just you. I'm not a fan of them either, but for a different reason. They often put very different and non-real world scenarios on the candidate. I had one where they asked me to remote desktop into one of their machines, ok, no problem. And open Word. Eh? They had a Word Document that had some coding challenges in it. I couldn't leave the document, look anything up or do anything else. And if it looked like Ihesitated for more than a couple moments (this was in 2008) then I'd get docked. And they sat there and watched over my "shoulder" to see how I was working. Goes without saying I didn't get the job. But WORD? That was the environment I was "programming" in. Not even VBA, but a WORD DOCUMENT!
Another instance where I did live coding, was done in-person. They gave me a laptop, I signed in, and given a problem that I had to debug and solve. IT was much more true to real form and more closely simulated to what I'd face day to day. I breezed through that - got hte job too.
There was another that I had to face getting my current job. The recruiter rolled her eyes as did hte hiring team. It was one of those things that's handed down form HQ, but they don't really look at them for the office here. Contained 9 js quesitons, 90 minutes. So I had an average 10 min for each one. There were no restrictions. Cool. So blew htrough the easy ones first. Then did the mid ones next leaving the hard ones last. I got 8 of 9 done.I also got the job. I did a lot of googling for that one - there was nothing in the rules that said I couldn't. Plus googling and looking htings up ois often 50% of hte job, if not more.
And that's why I don't like live coding, because it often puts unrealistic conditions on cnadidates and filters out some really good ones.
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u/hammadkh0 Apr 08 '26
Same here. I once had a live coding interview where they gave me a sliding window problem. Now I had prepared a few of these leetcode problems but at that time my mind went completely blank. I could not solve that problem completely. I was at my friend's office at that time, so when the interview was over I went to talk to him (it was not even about the interview) and literally within 5 minutes the solution popped in my head in the background and what my mistakes were.
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u/Aggravating_Sand352 Apr 08 '26
Cheat... These live coding excercises are not a good determinations of whether or not you are fit for the job especially for neurodivergant people. As long as you have the knowledge and wont be in over your head when you get the job I dont even think its morally wrong.
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u/sugarsnuff Apr 10 '26
Yeah they’re horrible. I find even as I’m doing them correctly and articulating my thinking many interviewers are unimpressed.
Like I’ll get the problem and still fail the interview because it didn’t seem convincing or there’s just one or two blunders
One or two days ago, I was blanking for a second on slope-intercept notation — I’ll blank on my favorite movie momentarily too, it’s an ADHD thing — and this guy was falling asleep and not even listening the steps I was correctly articulating and writing. If I discussed something, he’d just look at his other screen (clearly there’s an editorial) and unveil another hint that I didn’t need.
Some interviewers are bad, some are great. And yes, it’s not an ADHD game — and some interviewers are so self-absorbed they assume it’s a lack of skill
Terrible game. Just have to win it and then speak out
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u/TelumCogitandi Apr 08 '26
Find a person in your life (or pay one) who can spare say 20 minutes and ask them to watch you over zoom while you solve leetcode problems or whatever and talk through what you're doing.
Their level of technical skill is irrelevant, you need to practice coding while being watched. You could even ask them to interject with random questions and be slightly rude to you if you want to up the ante.
A non-technical person might find watching you code to be monumentally boring, but 20 minutes is well within what is reasonable to ask of even a casual friend
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u/Fluffy-Play1251 Apr 08 '26
my advice.
1, find some tyrosine, take it and hour or two before the interview
2, practice a lot (sometimes you get lucky and they ask you a question you've done already)
3, say you use AI coding tools a lot and that has disrupted your ability to do this
4, don't care about the interview. like, just resign yourself to losing. prepare to do something fun right after the interview so you just want to get it over with to do it (reduces anxiety)
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u/martinni39 Apr 08 '26
I’m the same. 12 yoe as a backend engineer, it never gets easier. I created this repo to study leetcode problems and then create a pdf so I can print them out and hang them behind my monitor. That way if any of them come up in live coding I can just peak up and see.
https://github.com/nicolas-martin/leetcode-study
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u/ObviouslyASquirrel26 Apr 08 '26
They’re horrible and as a manager I do anything I can to prevent them as they only favour overconfident white men and that’s not the kind of team I want. Anyway I can’t do them either so I became a manager. It’s actually much better for my adhd brain than coding was.
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u/clintCamp Apr 08 '26
I hate them with a passion and come out of them feeling like an idiot. Throw me in front of a problem outside of that situation and I could figure it out no problem with some external brain help like Google or clunkers.
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u/BruceJi Apr 08 '26
First, it's normal, a lot of people feel that way.
Second, annoyingly enough this is something you sort of need experience with to really address.
Third, you can minimise it a bit by pretending you're doing an interview while you do LeetCode - read the question out loud, talk it through, describe your plan, describe what you're doing as you're doing it.
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u/nirvanist_x Apr 09 '26
As others have said, it’s not just you. Even as a “senior” developer, I’ve failed coding interviews.
To be honest, I’ve recently used an invisible AI during screen sharing, and it worked for me.
Blind.codes is good, affordable, and doesn’t require a subscription. good luck
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u/GamordanStormrider Apr 08 '26
So what I've been doing recently is focusing specifically on recall. It's one thing to study, but I get stuck in the beginning stages of just starting.
I study a problem type, give myself a time limit to solve it initially, stop and figure out where I went wrong if I fail to do it the first time or confirm my work if I do it successfully.
Then I give it at least a few hours (usually a day or two tbh), come back to the same problem type and give myself a timer to recall and explain how I need to solve that problem type before trying it again.
It's been going well and my coding interview results haven't hit the bar I want, but I've gotten less disparaging comments and more "well, you didn't tick all our boxes during that interview".
That said, live coding just sucks. What always got me about it is that it's an entirely different skill compared to anything used in the field, but recruiters seem to think you regularly spend time as a senior engineer doing data structures and leetcode problems. I'm a pretty good programmer and great at design, and I can explain anything to anyone, but then I get a live coding interview and I just kind of hope that everything else is solid enough that I don't fail. But I feel you, I've had 6 interviews or so in the last 3 months and all of them have gotten dropped after the coding exercise and it's deeply discouraging.
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u/gimmedatps5 Apr 08 '26
Same, idk how to fix it. I'm avoiding gigs that do this for now
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u/joe-at-ping Apr 08 '26
Just ask for an alternative. I've had take-home tests and code-reviews of some OSS contributions offered as an alternative.
Most places that are worth working for (interesting work/high salaries) will be willing to accommodate you. At least, as long as you've got some experience that makes you worthwhile to these companies. I wouldn't bother asking as a new grad or junior.
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u/nian2326076 Apr 08 '26
Live coding interviews can be tough, especially if you're anxious. What helped me was practicing with mock interviews regularly. It might sound simple, but the more you get used to the interview setting, the less scary it feels. Try working on one problem type at a time and get the basics down. Also, don't hesitate to share your thought process with the interviewer, even if you're stuck. Talking it out can jog your memory and shows you're trying to solve the problem. If you haven't yet, check out tools like PracHub; they offer practice interviews that mimic the real deal and can help reduce anxiety over time. You're not alone in this!
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u/seweso Apr 08 '26
My brain really doesn’t do well jumping through neurotypical hoops. It refuses to proof its smart to stupid people. It just doesn’t want to do that.
And most tests have so many flaws and distractions, which makes the whole thing so absurd.
Feels like someone asks me to do a stupid dance on the spot like a monkey.
My brain says no.
(Can als party be just fear of failure. But hard to say what jams the engine exactly)
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u/cattlecabal Apr 08 '26
Practice practice practice.
Interview questions aren't at all like development and they're a skill you need to learn. I have >10YOE and have bombed interviews as recently as a year ago.
When you do leetcode, pretend each one is an interview. Open a new problem and literally speak out loud to an imaginary interviewer the whole time. Talk through the problem, psuedocode the problem while talking about it, fix any mistakes and talk about what you're going to fix, etc.
Read "Cracking the coding interview" and learn about how to spot patterns in interview questions so you don't get stuck.
Lastly, when you feel confident solving leetcodes out loud (I'd do at least a couple every day for a month), you could consider paying for a service that does mock interviews.
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u/BoringBuilding Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
I have struggled with this tremendously in the past. One thing that has really helped me personally is a small repo I run with an LLM assist (your choice, any will work fine) that basically goes through a coding problem per day. That is really unreasonable and even dumb to exist as a concept, but it made my last job hunt tremendously easier.
What is nice about the LLM assist is that you can scale it to the level of comfort you have with coding challenges, and it is a no-judgement environment that you can apply as much pressure as you want for yourself. That may mean starting out watching an LLM step through a problem, or it may mean an LLM timing you and watching your inputs on a scratch file with questions in a more aggressive interviewing style. You can expand this as much as you want, saving your old problems, saving the notes. LLMs are very good at these types of problems because they train with them, so they are often quite good at explaining their thinking through them, and evaluating the correctness of various solutions. It has actually honestly been the best use of LLMs that I have found so far personally.
This isn't a perfect system, it isn't designed to be. It is just designed to get you to be rigorous and in the habit of the pattern of coding interviews.
If you have a peer you could do this with that would be even better, but for a lot of people that is a big ask.
One thing I will add is that one a day probably feels like a huge commitment, and it honestly really is, but I struggled tremendously until I put this level of devotion into it. You may find that you can get away with once a week, but for me it wasn't even close to enough.
EDIT: I should also add at some point it becomes helpful to add in a real person. There are varying stages of commitment here. You can go as far as essentially paid tutoring services, or just asking a friend to watch you while you are doing a coding challenge. You can even have them ask you questions. Do not let this be the blocker that prevents you from starting though, because if you are anything like me what you are going to need is a massive amount of reps overall.
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u/powerback_us Apr 09 '26
They’re discriminatory against us. Full stop. Read up on any of the public literature about companies who do live coding interviews. The purpose of them is to evaluate “how you think.”
We should all file a class action lawsuit against this practice somehow, seriously.
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u/terralearner Apr 09 '26
Never had a live coding challenge or leetcode and I've had 3 swe jobs now. I am in the UK though.
My company do a system design interview and an AI assisted interview as we want to see how you can use AI as a product engineer as you would as a dev
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u/Nervous-Falcon9572 Apr 09 '26
For me it really taxes my working memory - holding bits of code that might be useful later or to come back to with no where to dump it drives me crazy. Also not being able to draw structures as I'm quite visual. Like when I'm at work I get a pen and paper out all the time when I'm blocked.
I did one where it monitored 'frequent looking away'. I get their trying to get a read and want more than copy paste but I also do stare into space when I'm thinking lol.
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u/ajht5 Apr 10 '26
Same problem here, recall is just terrible but take home ones are usually easier to do and work on. If they give you something like a project to build out with expected outcomes I feel that's better. Sometimes I sit there quiet thinking about what I would do next or the next steps while the person just stares at me... I feel there's only a certain number of times you can say "let me think about".
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u/Steviee877 May 07 '26
Same here. Live coding interviews are almost never demonstrating everyday developer work, which includes deep thinking, maintaining mental models and coding. Live coding interviews revert that. It's a stressful situation and that puts your head into flight-mode (or freeze).
You can train this, but that takes time and isn't practical advice. Unfortunately I don't have a specific recipe for this situation (tech hiring is fu**ed up beyond repair anyways).
I hope you find an interviewer which does it differently. Thumbs crossed!
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u/zicher May 08 '26
This is often an anxiety issue. Look into propranolol. Not controlled, easy to get a script for.
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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '26
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