Thinking aloud in a coding interview

What's judged: your reasoning, not just your answer. One engineer who failed big-tech interviews despite strong algorithm skills suspected he wasn't explaining his thinking clearly; a former interviewer replied that if the interviewer struggles to understand you, it's a major barrier. Lead moves: Headline, Reason, Pace.

Template: restate the problem → state your approach before coding → narrate decisions, not keystrokes.

"So we need the longest substring without repeats. I'll use a sliding window with a hash map — that gets us O(n). Let me start with the window logic and then handle the edge cases."