Finally! After a while of shooting in the dark and frantically fiddling with sample inputs on the whiteboard, you've came up with an algorithm for solving the coding question your interviewer gave you.
Whew. Such a relief to have a clear path forward. To not be flailing anymore.
Now you're cruising, getting ready to code up your solution.
When suddenly, your interviewer throws you a curve ball.
"What if we thought of the problem this way?"
You feel a tension we've all felt during the coding interview:
"Try to listen to what they're saying...but don't lose your train of thought...ugh, I can't do both!"
This is a make-or-break moment in the coding interview. And so many people get it wrong.
Most candidates end up only half understanding what their interviewer is saying. Because they're only half listening. Because they're desperately clinging to their train of thought.
And it's easy to see why. For many of us, completely losing track of what we're doing is one of our biggest coding interview fears. So we devote half of our mental energy to clinging to our train of thought.
To understand why that's so wrong, we need to understand the difference between what we see during the coding interview and what our interviewer sees.
Working on a coding interview question is like walking through a giant maze.
You don't know anything about the shape of the maze until you start wandering around it. You might know vaguely where the solution is, but you don't know how to get there.
As you wander through the maze, you might find a promising path (an approach, a way to break down the problem). You might follow that path for a bit.
Suddenly, your interviewer suggests a different path:
