Carefully pick your clarifying questions. People always suggest to ask clarifying questions and I think it's often seen as a negative thing in real life (which

Carefully pick your clarifying questions. People always suggest to ask clarifying questions and I think it's often seen as a negative thing in real life (which is sad). Instead, repeat the problem out loud and write scenarios on the whiteboard right away. Show that you've already started working on the problem. If you ask too many questions up front you'll have to come up with a perfect solution to redeem yourself. Work your solution through various examples, cases, exceptions, etc. It will show that you understand the complexity of a problem by mentioning all the complex cases out loud. It's like saying "here is how you're trying to trap me with this problem, I can finger point the trap". Now it's all about translating that into a working function on the whiteboard. If you don't get the working function, at least they know you're smart.