Avoiding red flags

Now that we understand what live coding interviews and home assessments are, let’s briefly discuss perfection. Do we have to provide a perfect solution to pass the interview? What is the interviewer looking for?

That’s not an easy question as it may differ for various interviewers and companies.

But there’s something that all interviewers will look out for: red flags. The fact that we didn’t provide an optimized solution or didn’t know a particular Swift feature can be accepted by many interviewers – in most cases, they are looking for signals of something unhealthy in the way we approach, think, and code.

There are red flags we should avoid, even if they may initially seem insignificant to the interview process. Let’s go over some of them now.

Inability to explain or defend a solution

This is a red flag that incorporates two crucial missing skills. The first one is deep thinking and code/design understanding...