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Comment by caconym_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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 .

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

This is awesome. Learning Rust is also one of my goals. This is pretty great for comparing my solutions.

Especially when you have hardly ever had to use it in your 15 years career.

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