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Listening to this feedback immediately changed my success rate and helped my land my current job. Context: I am looking for Senior (L5) roles in Robotics/Systems/Embedded, and C++ is hard-required in all my Coding interviews (lmao, cursed af). However I do think the following will apply to all levels and languages. If you're using leetcode.com to practice, the posted solutions may lead you into a trap: the code style is often too spartan / minimal, and will get you rejected. To be clear, I think all the solutions I've seen are beautiful, minimal examples; I genuinely marvel at their simplicity and elegance. It's just the wrong style for FAANG+ (Big Tech, Decacorn, Scale-Ups, etc.) Take for example a problem involving Intervals. In all the solutions I've found for these types of problems, they tend to represent the intervals using pure std containers, eg. vector of vectors of ints, or map of int to vector of ints. They then index into these containers with double brackets, and use first and second to get to pair values: for (int i = 0; i < input.size(); i++) { int start = input[i][0].first; int end = input[i][0].second; ... } I tried doing something like this, got a working answer that looked like: int start = input[i][j].first; This got hard for me to reason about and, despite getting it working, I was fumbling a bit and the solution was ugly. You may be able to get away with that style if and only if: A) you can absolutely blast it out super fast with no errors, and its truly clean and elegant, B) you can do that without seeming like you memorized this exact solution, C) you can do that without seeming like you're using AI assistance (cheating). However, the rest of us aren't going to be able to do any of that. You'll be better off setting up something like the following, and using it in your logic. struct Interval { int start_time = 0; int end_time = 0; }; ... for (const Interval interval: intervals) { int current_start_time = interval.start_time; ... previous_start_time = current_start_time; } (C++ specific) If you need to insert it into an unordered_set/map, stub out the template hash<> boilerplate with a //TODO comment to fill it out later, don't waste time trying to write that during the interview. This is going to be more like the code you write in production AND it will be easier for you (and your host) to read and understand during the interview. Good luck out there!