And why would I want to store in my head a terrible solution to a problem that I'm literally only had to think about once every eight years or so in a random in

And why would I want to store in my head a terrible solution to a problem that I'm literally only had to think about once every eight years or so in a random interview and the first time I was taught it 14 years ago in college? It's something I've never had to use at work, and I've put together dozens of full applications over the years. That being said, I could probably still come up with it, but I encounter this problem when I interview sometimes. People will ask me to recall something we covered for ten minutes back in college that I've never used since and could easily Google in five minutes if I ever did need to use it, and then they go... "ooooh, he must not be very good..." when I can't instantly spout out the solution from memory in thirty seconds, and might not be able to picture it clearly in my head without writing it out or spending a few minutes thinking about it, possibly even writing some quick code to see what happens, like I get to do whenever I'm actually working and on the job. Most recently I got that with a combinatorial function (write a function to come up with all possible combinations for blah). I was having a hard time picturing how it would show every combination in my head, including in a jumbled order. I could figure it out if I could hack away at the code for an hour, and I remembered going over it briefly in college, but I've never needed to do it in my personal or professional projects since, and so it wasn't fresh in my head. The feedback I got was they were passing on me because I got that one question wrong. I'm perfectly competent and could easily handle the job, but because I didn't study every possible algorithmic and non-algorithmic question I could possibly be asked in the three days notice I had before the interview, tough. I'm more a fan of seeing the results of people's work than asking them trivia over a field whose sphere of knowledge keeps doubling every five years that they can't possibly store every single thing in their heads at all times.