Hello everyone,

Like the title says, I am not sure about the difference between demonstrating your knowledge to approach problems vs showing you know how to solve this problem.

My guess is that demonstrating your problem solving ability begins with understanding the question, identifying brute force, optimizing, etc, and showing you know how to solve the problem is just literally solving the problem.

However, there may be situations where you just know a certain method would work that leads you to the best solution. I think it's best to go through the brute force and build the solution one by one, but what if you know this process to well, and it seems obvious to the interviewer that you've done this problem?

These days I'm practicing starting from brute force for all problems to reach an optimized solution, but as I am reviewing, I just clearly remember on how to approach it from step 1, and I am worried that I might sound too robotic or overconfident during an interview

Did anyone go through this phase, and if so, do you have any suggestions?

Thanks!