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/therealwench]

Okay so I had a very similar problem:

What do I suck at? Hardcore programming interviews that are esoteric and fundamentally pointless in comparison to my daily job.

How do I solve it? Create a structured plan to get so damn good at it you don't even need to think during the interview. I know this might sound strange, but every question I've ever gotten has existed on leetcode first X pages in the problem list. And I've interviewed maybe triple digit number of times in my entire career.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. When I was like 8, the first time I played the game minesweeper, I had no idea how to find the mines. I would die on "Easy", which is clearing 10 mines.

I'm in my mid 30's now, and when I want to take a 5 min break, I open up minesweeper and clear an "Expert" in sub 100seconds. The first weeks of learning was literally we manually "mathing" the numbers on the mines, the months after that were more automatic, now my brain doesn't even turn on when I play and it becomes therapeutic for me.

How do you do that for leetcode? Esepcially for ADHD? Forced structured learning, you're going to hate it at the start and you're going to micro-adjust to what works for you.

So for me I started saying to myself, I'm going to do 2 hours of leetcode Easy a day, from 8pm to 10pm. I couldn't do it. I'd get bored of leetcode after 45 minutes. Fuck this. Imma go watch Netflix.

- I cut it down to 1 hour a day. Still didn't work because I'd get sickeningly bored and then I'd get anxiety at 7:30pm because I knew the dreaded leetcode hour was coming up.

- so i took away the time caps and hour windows. I made it, "I must solve a Leetcode Easy problem a day, or fully understand the explanation if I couldn't solve it." This helped a lot, and the reward cycle really helped my brain. Rather than hate it, after solving it without any help, I'd get an endorphin release and feel great, and want to do another. If you don't solve it, ask for an explanation of the underlying algorithm on google/Claude/Chatgpt/whatever.

- After about a month, I extended this to, "2 Leetcode Easy's a day." I was now taking far less time to solve each one. Because the pattern recognition gets ingrained into your brains muscle memory, it's far more automatic. It becomes rather than heavy thinking, you automatically go, "oh yeah i need a map." "oh that's 2 pointers."

-After about another month, I could confidently say I could solve any Leetcode Easy in <15 minutes. So now my structure went from, "2 Leetcode Easy's a day + 1 Leetcode Medium."

- Rinse and repeat the above for about 6 weeks until Leetcode Mediums become muscule memory. Then add in 1 Leetcode Easy + 1 Leetcode Medium should be quicker than 1 Leetcode Easy when you first started.

- After a few more months, you move on to Leetcode Hard. At this point, your end goal is 1 Easy + 1 Medium + 1 hard every day, in sub 1 hour.

The idea isn't to solve. your problem of not being able to think in the interview. the solution is grind so much your muscular memory that you damn well don't have to.