I hate coding interviews

Published: 7/21/2025

I'm decent at coding. But I suck at interviews.

You might think I'm talking about the behaviour part of interviews, like talking to people, but no, I mean coding interview.

“But didn’t you say you are decent at coding?”

Yeah, but coding interviews and coding are two different games.

Once upon a time, I was passionate about coding. I coded 8 hrs a day every single day for about a year. As a result, I was much more competent than my peers and felt confident in my coding abilities.

When I applied for jobs, I thought that people would easily see that I’m just better than other candidates. But I was wrong.

I was interviewing for a startup. They prepared a little coding test for me. At that point, I didn’t even know what LeetCode was. I was just really confident in my coding ability and thought that I could go through whatever was put in front of me.

They set up a co-working platform, similar to Google Docs for coding. You can write code in the web IDE, and the interviewer can see it immediately without screen sharing.

This was the question:

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"Given an array of integers nums and an integer target, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to target.

You may assume that each input would have exactly one solution, and you may not use the same element twice.

You can return the answer in any order.

Example 1:

Input: nums = [2,7,11,15], target = 9 Output: [0,1] Explanation: Because nums[0] + nums[1] == 9, we return [0, 1]"

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For those of you who know where this question comes from. shhh! Don’t spoil it.

But this question does not seem that hard, right? All you need are two for loops, and you will get the job done. So I started coding and finished it. It passed all the test cases. I felt proud.

But then the interviewer says, “Cool, can you make it more efficient?”

My mind went blank. “What do you mean by more efficient? I already got the job done.”

At the time, I was a year-one student who didn’t really learn much about how DSA works.

I was there, sweating, and hoped that somehow I would come up in the answer like the smart protagonist in Anime.

But I couldn't.

Unexpectedly, I failed the interview. At some point, the interviewer was so annoyed, he just told me the answer. And I still couldn’t put that out. And he had to tell me what to write line by line. So he can end the interview.

That was a frustrating experience. I was questioning whether I was smart enough to be a programmer.

Until I came across this video about how a senior programmer prepared for his coding interview. He says that after all those years of programming, he still has to practice DSA questions just to pass a coding interview.

And that hit me. Maybe it’s not because I’m not smart enough. Maybe I just didn’t prepare enough.

So I grabbed the coding interview book. Read it and practice DSA questions every single day for a couple of months. I found out that the question from the coding interview earlier was literally the Q1 on LeetCode. That speaks about how much preparation I did.

And guess what? My ability to code in technical interviews got so much better.

I practice, so I improved. How surprising.

If you are in a similar situation where you question your ability because of failing interviews, or you are stressed about upcoming interviews, just know that there’s nothing wrong with you. You probably haven't practiced enough. Other developers also hate coding interviews. They just practiced more than you did.

If you are preparing for a frontend/web dev interview, I found a great resource called GreatFrontend. This is why I like it:

• The questions are actual interview questions from tech companies.
• The exercises are like LeetCode for Frontend Devs
• It covers quiz questions that might catch you off guard

It has 200+ free questions for practice, but you have to pay to unlock all of them.

Try it for free here:

​https://www.greatfrontend.com/prepare/coding?fpr=animecoders​

Fee from Anime Coders

PS: Next week, I will provide a more comprehensive list of resources to help you prepare for coding interviews

PPS: FYI: I’m an affiliate for GreatFrontend, which means if you click and buy, I will probably earn a commission