Item — HN Reader

That’s an interesting definition of fair.

An interview is not a fairness competition. They are rarely fair and subjective. The end goal of any interview is to enter into a contract which exchanges money for time. The setting of an interview is an informational asymmetric paradigm. Your one sided fairness won’t make the process fair.

You may still want to keep letting your interviewer know that you solved the question before. However, this doesn’t make the process fair. It’s a story that you’re probably telling yourself to make it feel better ;)

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It's not fair for yourself and you'd do a huge disservice to yourself, but perhaps someone who said "I've seen this before" and got positive results can contradict me, but let me explain:

99% of people (as a person who's done interviews a while ago) never say "I've seen this before" -- either because they're lying or never seen it before or don't remember.

When you say "I've seen this before" you put the interviewer on edge and derail his interviewing flow, he's going to second guess every answer you give -- "has he seen this one also?" and might switch to really obscure questions that actually disadvantage you as an honest interviewee.

Then when he'll make his final appraisal of your score he'll put a big question mark over your result and might go for someone with lower scores but that he feels has never seen those questions before.

To be clear, I'm not talking about obvious questions like "how can you determine if a linked list has a loop without aditional data structures" -- where you either know Dijkstra's solution or you don't, and can't possibly come up with the solution on the spot.