That has been my experience, too. I remember deriving the optimal solution for an interview question that was a variant of a radix sort and impressing the inter

That has been my experience, too. I remember deriving the optimal solution for an interview question that was a variant of a radix sort and impressing the interviewer for one of the hot startups at the time. That was partly the result of my ability to recognize the similarities between the problems but even more a consequence of having recently studied radix sorts. Twenty years later, I'm a much better developer than I was then and have shipped many projects with significant degrees of complexity, but I couldn't answer that interview question or ones like it as well today as I did then.