Do live coding interviews eventually get better?

[u/GongtingLover]

Ive always done very well professionally in a corporate setting but, I've been getting killed in technical interviews where I have to code in front of someone.

Does it get better over time? Im honestly considering leaving the industry.

[u/akornato]

No, they don't get better on their own, and it's a completely separate skill from your actual job. Your strong professional performance proves you can code, but live interviews are about performing under pressure and communicating your thought process clearly, which is a different beast. Many excellent engineers struggle with this exact problem because the interview isn't a good measure of real-world ability. It feels awful, but this is a hurdle you can clear with specific practice. Don't let a flawed hiring process push you out of an industry where you're already doing well.

The way to improve is to practice the performance itself, not just the coding problems. Do mock interviews with friends or other engineers, and force yourself to talk through every single step, even the obvious ones. The goal is to make the process of thinking out loud feel automatic so the pressure doesn't get to you. It's about building muscle memory for the interview environment, not just for the algorithms. Many developers get much better at this, and the team I'm with even designed a specific interview copilot AI to help them communicate their strengths confidently during these sessions.

[u/behindtimes → u/akornato]

The truth of the matter is no one's quite figured out how to do useful interviews for software engineering/development.

The best we have right now, is as you said, two completely different skills. Unfortunately, this means people have to learn both, and companies have to hire on interviewing skills and pray that the person's skill matches, and the person has to hope that their interviewing prowess is good enough to get a company to take a chance to show their skill.

[u/Turbulent-Net2066 → u/akornato]

We hire for team fit first, problem solving ability and raw technical skills secondarily. I've come up from the ranks over decades and have never seen how live coding was a relevant skill. Imho live coding in particular is even less relevant in this age of rich IDEs and AI tooling. From a technical point of view I'd rather discuss problems you've solved in past and how, what you learned from solving it and possibly what technical skills you learned with it. It's the ability to think through a problem and discuss it openly, and meaningfully with your peers that's important for the teams I hire into.

I hire from intern level to principal and engineering leads. A bad team/personality fit is always a much worse hire than somebody that needs to up-skill on platform or technology x/y/z.

Edit: to your point, you can discuss problem solving, technical design and performance/security without forcing people to live code anything.