Cheating without a doubt is not the way to go, but this also exposes a major problem with interviews (and my personal gripe).

Interviews are not testing on skill or actual problem solving, they're testing how well a candidate can memorize solutions and algorithms, and how fast they can spit those solutions out from memory.

I've been through countless interviews where in 60 mins I had to solve one easy, and/or two medium leetcode level questions that bare no relevance to the job description.

As a person with ADHD and generalized-anxiety, it is incredibly hard to perform at your best, when you're not given the opportunity to display your best.

You could go to the BEST school and learn the BEST concepts, but you still have to spend hundreds of hours on leetcode memorizing solutions and patterns. And when practicing these leetcode questions, it takes some time to wrap your head around a question.

So of course it will be tempting to just write down the solution on the side, rather than spend hours trying to memorize or feel overwhelmed by not figuring out the solution within a 30-60 mins time slot.

Meanwhile, when you're on the job, solutioning can take a few hours or even days. And solutioning is iterative and sometimes INNOVATIVE. It's rare your solution matches a particular pattern. Especially if you're dealing with an older code base rather than a new system.

Futhermore, a lot of time as a programmer is spent researching like reading documentation, understanding/collecting requirements, pseudocoding, and collborating!

The focus of interviews shouldn't be how fast a person can think of a solution, but the process of solutioning.