[fencepost]

Do you actually suck at this or do you have a great case of impostor syndrome (perhaps a pattern you're failing to recognize?)? You might be surprised at where you'd rank compared to the general population.

As far as retaining things, there's an awful lot of stuff where you don't need to remember the details - knowing something exists lets you go find details when needed, and the more useful items will stick with you after you start using them regularly. I'll use trees as an example - there are more different kinds of trees and ways to implement them than you can shake a stick at, but most programmers aren't going to need to implement any of them ever. Do you need to remember details about balancing, etc? Probably not.

[putsjoe]

> knowing something exists lets you go find details when needed

Thank you for this, it's a nice concise way to explain that even the experienced use Google all of the time.