[Aeolun]

> If you've seen the question/answer before just say so!

In my experience failing to answer the alternative question you give me has (on average) a much more negative impact than pretending I don’t know your question (especially when I can explain it).

[dvirsky]

Yep, I did it a couple of times and I didn't get any credit, just got harder questions that the interviewer did not practice in a long time. You should only disclose this if you're getting the same question in the same interview round from the same company, or maybe if you're back for another round a couple of years after failing.

As an interviewer though, there were a few instances where I just told people "let's do this problem anyway, don't worry" and the candidates didn't always do a good job.

[xtracto]

> As an interviewer though, there were a few instances where I just told people "let's do this problem anyway, don't worry" and the candidates didn't always do a good job.

This is what I've done as an interviewer. But then, my questions actually lend themselves to that. Something that the sample LeetCode questions just don't.

In my experience (as interviewer) LeetCode kind of questions are "gotcha" kind of tests: Either you know "the trick" or you don't, but there's no real constructive value.

In contrast, I prefer tests like let's write a Tic-Tac-Toe, Snake, Twitter-clone (no DB in memory), etc. in 30/60 minutes together in your computer with your IDE, your software, google and language of choice. I am able to do a quick coding session with the person, see her weaknesses and strengths, and even if he has done it before, looking at his real project coding style is super useful.

[raydev]

> there were a few instances where I just told people "let's do this problem anyway, don't worry" and the candidates didn't always do a good job

Which should be a clear indicator that interviews aren't only judging problem solving skills, but also the candidate's ability to withstand the pressure of being watched and judged while they solve complicated problems.

For the interviewer, it's just another day and sure, they "want the candidate to succeed" and all that, but for the candidate, their future and livelihood are on the line and that's tough for some of us to just ignore while we focus on the not-easy school quiz problem of merging overlapping intervals or whatever.

[jjj123]

Yeah and often the interviewer won’t be prepared with a backup question so you waste time for them to find one. It sucks that it puts the interviewee in a worse position for being honest.

[sharpy]

A advantage to having standard interview questions. Plus the questions we ask lend themselves to extensions (also predefined) so you can still see how they reason about and solve those. And given that our interviewers are familiar with them, we can calibrate across many candidates. We also have a pool of people who maintain the standard interview questions.

[jjj123]

Yeah I worked for a company that did all of those things as well, it didn’t change the fact that the interviewer was always less prepared with the second question, and that there’s always wasted time switching between questions. The true nightmare was when a candidate knew two questions in a row, or when they didn’t realize they knew a question until 5-10 minutes in.

In a perfect world every interviewer would calibrate for those minutes lost, but that calibration is fuzzy at best unless it’s built in to your scoring rubric.