Unwritten rules about coding interviews

I haven’t been interviewing for a while. Last time I interviewed was before pandemic where people still invited to onsite and write code on whiteboard. We used to pseudo run few test cases over whiteboard and that was all about in terms of debugging. If you don’t remember a function or a collection class, you can always ‘assume’ it works as you expected. Or ‘imagine’ there is a utility function doing exactly what you needed to do.

To be honest, I never been good at coding interviews. But I was able to pass half of them.

I started interviewing again after few weeks of leetcoding, at this time, I was thinking I’m the best I ever could be. I can write flawless code for mediumdifficulties and submit it to leetcode passing test cases! Yay! Wow! Big lifetime achievement !!!!

I’m dreaming for FANG and big TC and all!!!

Then I started interviews, after 10 or so interviews, rejections after rejections, I realized like the bar raised increadible high at this point. Historically We are at peak difficulty for coding interviews.

My expeirence so far,
- I got asked LC hard or even harder, even for smaller startups.
- your code MUST work. Must be complete.
- No brute force solution allowed, never.
- All test cases must pass, I failed one interview with 13 of 15 cases passed.
- Function and variable names must all be reasonable
- coding conventions must be followed for the language of choice.
- additional test cases must also past, in one case, interviewer, brought additional test cases to fail me after 10 or so cases already passed.
- time limitation, hard cut off, if you can’t finish, they don’t even allow you to tell your solution.
- Chinese interviewers always almost rejected me even if I thought I done all above. Why Chinese interviewers are too picky and they don’t tell what they are looking for?

Edit: I’m not racist. Stop hating me. On contrary, indian interviewers are fighting you to reject you. They try to find edge cases, something missing or a race condition or name it, they are chatty and try to steale mate you, they try to justify your rejection. You know you are rejected and you know why because such and such cases did not pass.

Is that how you feel or I’m the only one?