How not to turn into a mammoth?

Question

C++ / C#

Hello.
I had a template break the other day, and now I'm sad ;)
In short. For the last 10 years I have been working in decent companies. I write under Windows.
Now I'm filing a project with 1M source files (it's clear that ours is there ... 1%), and I don't particularly suffer from the volume / complexity of the code.
In general, there are no particular problems.
Pros, python, patterns, debugger - everything is ours.
But recently the team began to grow, and colleagues went to interview fresh candidates.
And I stayed to listen to their impressions of the interview.
Colleagues began to whine, like: but this one is not even a middle at all, and this one is not a senior, but this one does not know anything about a tree.
I began to bend my fingers and realized that I myself would not be able to answer the enumerated questions.
I don't seem to be a master of computer science. (it turned out right away that I don’t remember all 23 patterns of the gang of four, I know almost nothing about hashes, and I can walk the tree only in the simplest way. I’m generally silent about 100500 sorting algorithms).
As a result, I have cognitive dissonance. How can it be: I don’t know all this, but it doesn’t interfere with my work? And now what i can do? Knowledge is rapidly outdated and it seems that I know less than a modern student. (I myself, in the anamnesis, am a graduate of the ACS of a secondary university).
F1!!
PS: And at the same time, I have a feeling that over the past 20 years I have never needed a sorting algorithm at all. But the need to understand WinAPI is needed almost every day.
ZZZY: And what is more interesting, when I got a job I was not so tormented at interviews
. I don't have a process guide.

Answer 1

And about the hatches, that they didn’t ask at all?
Here are the noobs

If the interview process is given at the mercy of just anyone, then it most often slides into measuring knowledge in a vacuum
If your ignorance bothers you, then finish your studies
Also, it is always advised to go to interviews just for the sake of pumping up the skill of passing interviews
Formal Signor = June with 5+ years of experience, who is able to solve real problems
June is a person who knows PL with minimal experience in solving real problems

Answer 2

1. It seems that those who are interviewing have nothing to do or they are too green to understand the meaning of project management. At the interview, you need to ask not all the nuances of languages ​​/ frameworks, but what is really required in the project, and the ability to deal with the new within the project. When interviewing, you can almost always fill up if you wish, but whether this should be done is unclear.
2. Okay, but if you are not given a task at the interview, will you figure it out or will you worry that you don’t know by heart?
3. Self-organization and the ability to work are often more important than specialized knowledge, because everything in the world of IT and business leads to this - the simplification of programming languages, automation, all these scrums - all this leads to a decrease in human error and the possibility of replacing a programmer.

Answer 3

There is a difference between knowing what you don't know and knowing what you don't know. In the first case, you know what you need to know to solve a specific problem, and in the second, you are just stupid.

Answer 4

Knowing by heart all the patterns and sortings in isolation from reality and tasks is useless. It is enough to know what they are and understand when it is worth thinking about their application. So it’s better to ignore such questions and not suffer, of course, provided that in a combat situation you don’t sort with a bubble.

Answer 5

Often the real business requirements are far from those that apply to the employee.
Most tasks can (and are) done by mediocre programmers, but it's scary to admit it.
If you have real tasks, then there is no point in whining, you should find options to work with what is on the market.