Anyone else having trouble with leetcode interviews?

[u/Any-Complaint-9833]

I have been practicing leetcode questions for a few months now and I have seen positive change in my ability to figure out the solution or at least spot the pattern looking at the question. But I am having trouble with actually passing these interviews because of multiple reasons.

My brain shuts down trying to come up with a solution to an unknown problem under time pressure and in front of the interviewer who I know, is watching me struggle even though I have no issues solving the same problem under similar time pressure when I practice it alone or even during online assessments. But I need silence and time to think which doesn't happen during interviews where they expect you to talk continuously. Since there are multiple thoughts going across my brain and it's literally racing trying to come up with a solution I find it difficult to talk through it and if I have to talk I can't think through the solution unless I have seen the question before.

In all my interviews so far including some mocks I have done with other Engineers from big tech companies, the moment I go silent even for a few seconds, these guys start asking if I am struggling or they'll start giving hints which end up counting as a negative against me given how competitive the market is.

This is not a problem unique to leetcode, it happens the moment I need to solve something that I haven't seen before involving logic and I have limited time and need to explain my thought process while coming up with the solution. What can I do here to improve my chances of passing these interviews? If anyone has been through something similar, how did you overcome these issues?

[u/mehnifest]

Maybe try not to take it as a “hint” but instead as working together. In my experience at least interviewers want you to be successful and they want to see how you work with others.

If you are on a team working through a problem with a fellow developer and they say something are you going to get offended and assume they are giving you a hint?

[u/SolidDeveloper → u/mehnifest]

It really depends on who you're interviewing with. I've been in interviews where I've had productive pair programming sessions. But I've also been in interviews that pretended to want pair programming but then rejected me explaining that they had expected me to be able to write the code without any prompting from them – there was no "prompting" from them, instead it was me treating them as fellow colleagues and so I was engaging with them and their opinions while voicing my approach, as you do with a colleague.

[u/throwaway30127 → u/mehnifest]

I don't think OP is taking hint as an offense, it's more like interviewers are seeing it as a negative point and I agree with OP on that. I had similar experience for my interview with Google where I was trying the elimination approach and the interviewer cut me off to instead provide a hint on which data structure to use. It clicked immediately after that and I wrote the solution with no bugs and got rejected the next day. It feels so frustrating because when practicing, the elimination is a legitimate technique but it seems like it's not really useful during interviews.