The thing I hate about Gauntlet interviews is the emphasis on having everything right at the top of your head. There are a million things I know how to do but

The thing I hate about Gauntlet interviews is the emphasis on having everything right at the top of your head. There are a million things I know how to do but have filed away. Like writing a typedef for a C function pointer -- I just check out a source file I wrote before or man qsort because I don't remember the exact syntax. Or tricks with data structures -- I WROTE my own linked lists and trees but it's not something I do every day because it's pointless. Or certain Python tricks -- if I haven't done them in a while I just look them up. Gauntlets always turn out to be Gotchas! The more junk you know, the less of it you are focused on at any given moment. Give any CS major the exact same tests he took, 5 years after the fact, on the spot, and it's probably a straight fail. I remember the general sense of things and outsource the details to my prior work, open source code I can refer to, and Google.