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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I've seen some very bad interviewers that will fault you for non-perfect solutions, but most will have some sort of reasonable leeway in what they will take as a solution.

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This experience varies too much for the individual. I've been given almost no leeway with all of my interviews. Most of my peers are in a similar bucket but I will admit - I seem to get some of the worst experience out of my peer group. I am often given more LC hards than my peers and still rejected even if I give multiple solutions with optimal complexity. At this point, we all suspect it's due to superficial factors but can't obviously do anything about it.

Some people I know who are URT would not even have to solve the problem to get a passing grade. Some know this and actively take advantage of it (and good for them) but others are blissfully unaware and are shocked when they find out that what they experience isn't the norm.

What is URT?

UnderRepresented Talent.

Given your clear technical expertise here and on Twitter, I would argue that you might just be performing better than most people, so "most interviewers" are more reasonable with you specifically.

I appreciate the confidence in my abilities, but I meant this more as a “good interviewers are ok with you making syntax errors (I mean, you usually don’t have a compiler) and minor issues with your code”. In fact I actually prefer to ignore off by ones and other annoying bits to ensure the interviewer understands that I know what I’m doing with the general algorithm, then go back and do a pass where I ensure these are correct to preempt a “can you run this on some input for me/how would you test this/why do you think it is correct”. If you indicate what you’re doing as you do it “this might be off by one, I’ll fix this bound later” it has usually worked for me. Not to discount your point; I can’t speak for everyone’s experiences of course, but this has been mine.

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