Mock interviews with a friend felt fake until we started actually scoring each other instead of just being nice

For months our "mock interviews" were just us reading LeetCode prompts at each other and saying "yeah that's basically right" regardless of how the explanation actually went. Useless. What changed things was building a dumb little rubric first — communication, correctness, time — and forcing ourselves to give an actual number and one honest criticism after every round, even when it stung. First session under the new rules was uncomfortable. By the fourth, I'd fixed a habit of jumping straight to code before stating my approach out loud, which is apparently the thing that was costing me in real interviews.