For what it's worth, the two tricks I found for leet-code interviews were 1) do the simple stupid thing first - get something _working_, and then make it good and 2) explain what you're doing and what you're thinking about to your interviewers. I'm still not Great at the leet-code style, but you can get a lot of the way there with some basic knowledge about algorithmic design and complexity and data structures. In general, I've found finishing the problem and being able to talk coherently about it trumps finding the ideal solution.
(I also code like a psychopath - I'm constantly rewriting what I'm writing while I'm writing it, so a) slowing down and b) telling interviewers what I'm doing and why made that look less chaotic.)
I'm also not the person you want to hire if you're looking for deep algorithmic knowledge, though - I've got a long career of delivering high impact systems and solutions, but if you want someone to rewrite the index parsing algorithm in your mature database software to minimize lookup speed, you've got the wrong guy.
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For what it's worth, the two tricks I found for leet-code interviews were 1) do the simple stupid thing first - get something _working_, and then make it good and 2) explain what you're doing and what you're thinking about to your interviewers. I'm still not Great at the leet-code style, but you can get a lot of the way there with some basic knowledge about algorithmic design and complexity and data structures. In general, I've found finishing the problem and being able to talk coherently about it trumps finding the ideal solution.
(I also code like a psychopath - I'm constantly rewriting what I'm writing while I'm writing it, so a) slowing down and b) telling interviewers what I'm doing and why made that look less chaotic.)
I'm also not the person you want to hire if you're looking for deep algorithmic knowledge, though - I've got a long career of delivering high impact systems and solutions, but if you want someone to rewrite the index parsing algorithm in your mature database software to minimize lookup speed, you've got the wrong guy.