They stopped the code after five minutes

One developer failed three React interviews in a row after doing the thing candidates think is the job: writing code. In the first, the prompt was a real-time dashboard for a large crowd of users. They assumed a toast notification and started building it. The interviewer stopped them after five minutes.

The questions they wrote down afterward were not trivia. Walk through an approach before a component. A screen re-renders dozens of times a second: what do you check first? Your team wants a heavy state library and you think it is too much: how do you say so? After a design, “what could go wrong with this?” produced a freeze, because they had never attacked their own idea.

Talk, then type

The rooms were hiring for someone who could think next to another person without going quiet. A sentence they recommend when you do not know the pattern: you have not built this exact thing, and here is how you would think it through. That sentence is not a confession. It is the start of the interview.

What could go wrong with your own idea is that freeze, slowed down.