Another sad thing is that we lose our memory in a step function. We remember something for a long time without using it, and then all of sudden it's gone from our memory. That may explain why many lifers in Google could interviewed so badly. They joined Google when there was no leetcode and when Google had amazing high standards in asking math and algorithm puzzles and novel systems design questions. So, they are really good. They are also confident because they achieved a lot and led amazing projects in Google. Yet when they started to answer interview questions, they struggled with basic facts.
Sort of makes one wonder how important those “basic facts” really are.
That's not how memory works, in fact the more we recall something the more we start misremembering associated details
Not sure memory loss is quite that binary. Heading for mid-40s here, and often things are still there, but it's higher latency to fully recall it. A bit like it's stored off in Amazon Glacier. Or often I can get the first byte quickly ("I know that person's surname starts with a P") but retrieving the full answer takes longer and some brute force iterations. It's as if I've hit a hash-table collision and need to binary-compare the results, or I've reached a node in a tree-structure that has many branches ("Is it Pfeffle? Piper? No, Pfeiffer!")
How was that any better? Leetcode is math and algorithm puzzles.
>We may have all heard the saying “use it or lose it”. We experience it when we feel rusty in a foreign language or sports that we have not practised in a while. Practice is important to maintain skills but it is also key when learning new ones. This is a reason why many textbooks and courses feature exercises. However, the solutions to the exercises feel often overly brief, or are sometimes not available at all. Rather than an opportunity to practice the new skills, the exercises then become a source of frustration and are ignored.
Typical exercise soltion: How to draw an owl. 1. Draw some circles. 2. Draw the rest of the $@#% owl.