The intention of these exercises is that they should be attempted in a mock interview setting with another person playing the role of the interviewer. For all of the below types of interview - communication and interaction with the interviewer is critical. Engage with the interviewer, ask questions, explain your thought process. You want them to feel like you’re the type of person they can work with.
There's many different styles of technical coding interviews, these are just a few:
- Standard problem solving exercise
- TDD-style exercise - possibly with a simpler problem but it’s expected that you take a test-first approach
- Refactoring exercise where you’re given messy code and you need to improve it (sometimes with tests to make sure you’re not breaking it)
- Talk through your final project and answer specific technical questions about it
- etc.