I last interviewed in 2019 where I was passed on by several companies before my current job. In my spare time I study for interviews, even though I do not plan

I last interviewed in 2019 where I was passed on by several companies before my current job. In my spare time I study for interviews, even though I do not plan to interview again for another year at least. I try to fit in my interview study with general study of trying to have a deeper understanding of the framework, language and programming concepts in general. When I am trying to get something done I just skip over things, but if I am studying something and it makes a reference to, say, anonymous functions, and I don't really have a firm grasp on what anonymous functions are, then I go study that. I also take notes and quiz myself on topics, and sometimes I go back and quiz myself again. I sometimes get asked for a given work sample home, so I study to be able to put together the kind of state-of-the-art 2021 best practices work sample. Sometimes they say I can give my own code sample, not one to their spec, but I have to keep it up to date and similar to the work sample. The waste of time is things I only memorize for interviews. I rarely use characters don't need to memorize string to character conversion for my normal work, but I do so due to interviews. Or how to create a multiarray and print a specific element from it. Or how to divide a string into an array of words by the space. These are common things you need to do on 30-60 minute coding exercises, so I memorize them pretty much only for interviews. I also have been asked about IS-A, HAS-A whiteboard class design of the UML kind so I practice that as well. Then there are the host of programming, language and framework questions you can get. Or ones about git. I don't mind much as most of this stuff I find useful, other than memorizing how to convert a character into an integer which is something I rarely do for tickets, but have done more than once on coding interviews. And that memorization is not that hard. I try to fit in my study with a broader study, I am not just doing leetcode at night, not really learning anything. I am studying my language right now, in a couple of months I might go on leetcode and see how my skills have progressed. But I have the time now to spend weeks and months taking my time to study abstract things to get a deeper understanding of all of this, it will be a few months before I get back to learning tricks to sling out 30-60 minute code samples faster. But I have a programming day job that pays OK and is OK much of the time so I am in no rush. If I was unemployed or work was bad it would be a different story.