The strongest candidate I ever voted no on solved the problem in eleven minutes. Clean. Optimal. Caught the edge case I normally have to hint at twice. Then I opened my notes to write the scorecard and found one line: "Solved it. I have no idea how." That is the short version of why strong engineers fail coding interviews. Not because they can't code. Because nothing they did survived the trip from the room to the scorecard. The interview is not the thing being graded. The document I wri...