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Re:Acing the technical interview by caconym_ on Thursday March 16, 2017 @04:15PM (#13888762)
I guess I just think of it as limbering up the brain, even if what I "studied" isn't directly useful. I'm going to be a lot more effective at basically all the things you mentioned if I've been solving tricky problems in my spare time for a few weeks.

I totally agree that it's a shot in the dark, though.

Re:Acing the technical interview by lj3 on Thursday March 16, 2017 @06:28PM (#13889756)
Just out of curiosity, are you relatively young? Memorizing the same material for four months every time you switch jobs gets tedious after a 15 year long career.
Re:Acing the technical interview by caconym_ on Thursday March 16, 2017 @07:28PM (#13890079)
I've been in the industry for about 10 years. Like I said, it's more about limbering up my brain. I have a good time with it, and usually learn some new things. Memorization is pointless, so I try to solve new and interesting problems rather than re-implementing the same old data structures and algorithms every time.

To be sure, some people take it too far. The "four months" figure does not come from me.

Re:Acing the technical interview by dominotw on Thursday March 16, 2017 @10:02PM (#13890778)
> so I try to solve new and interesting problems

Curious if you have any examples. I have really hard time motivating myself to study same old ds and algorithms too .

Re:Acing the technical interview by bquinlan on Thursday March 16, 2017 @11:16PM (#13891133)
I wanted to learn Rust but didn't have a good project in mind. So I solved a bunch of interview problems: https://github.com/brianquinlan/learn-rust

Solving those problems gave me a reason to touch lots of parts of the language and was also intellectually interesting. See, for example: https://github.com/brianquinlan/learn-rust/tree/master/i18n

Re:Acing the technical interview by dominotw on Friday March 17, 2017 @09:34AM (#13893785)
This is awesome. Learning Rust is also one of my goals. This is pretty great for comparing my solutions.
Re:Acing the technical interview by collyw on Friday March 17, 2017 @06:35AM (#13892912)
Especially when you have hardly ever had to use it in your 15 years career.