Should you use pseudocode in coding interviews?

Yes, but judiciously.

Pseudocode is helpful in cases like:

- You want to establish the brute force solution so you can identify the bottlenecks and optimize it.
- You want to make sure your interviewer is on board with your approach before coding it for real.

The key is how to do it without wasting precious time. My main suggestion here is to keep it very high-level. For BCtCI, we came up with the concept of 'intended English': it's written like English but with indentation to show the code structure.

It looks something like this the attached image.

Note how I don't bother with details like index arithmetic or declaring variables to save time. This doesn't matter when you are conveying the idea of the algorithm.

Note how I also gave it a name ('Algo 1: brute force') and list the time and space complexity. Interviews often involve considering trade-offs between approaches, so having the options listed like this will be very helpful.