when the robot steals your muscle memory

Muscle memory

I don’t really know much about human physiology, but I’m pretty sure that “muscle memory” is a metaphor. I think muscles don’t actually remember things - the brain does. I’ve always heard the phrase used to describe something you have done so many times you don’t need to think about it. You can just do it while thinking about something else.

I was thinking about this as I brushed my teeth yesterday. I’m sure the first 10 or 20 times I brushed my teeth I had to actually think about it. But now, with decades of daily practice, it doesn’t take much mental effort. It’s in muscle memory.

My rough job interview

A while ago I had a job interview for a Senior Software Test Engineer job here in Denver. Like most of my jobs the past 20 years, this one mainly focused on writing software to test other software. In this case, the team uses the Python programming language, which I’ve used for a decade and am pretty good at.

The part of the interview that was general chit-chat about what I’ve done went well. The team I would be joining sounded like a good fit for what I do - both from a technical perspective and a team culture perspective. But the part of the interview I should have aced was a total shit show. Despite teaching the basics for 20 years, I suddenly forgot them. I felt like a deer in the head lights.

I beat myself up for several days after that interview, playing it over and over in my head. As I recalled the questions, there was one that I honestly didn’t know the answer to. But I didn’t feel too bad about that, because it was about something that I’ve never had to use in the real world. But the six or seven others were basic stuff that anyone who writes code regularly in Python knows.

The rejection letter

What I got from beating myself up

As part of replaying this nightmare over and over in my head, I wanted to know what it was about me that day that made me give such bad answers. Have I suddenly gotten interview nerves? I know a lot of people who get really nervous in interviews and lose half their IQ. But that’s not me, at least it hasn’t been in the past. Have I passed some magical age threshold where my brain has gone from middle-age to senile in one week? That doesn’t seem possible either.

Here’s the explanation I eventually came to. During my last couple months at my last job, I was using AI to redesign core software. That style of working is different than everything I’ve done before that. I would tell the AI what to do in big general terms, and it would write the nitty gritty code. Then I’d check it and rework it as needed. And now that it’s been five months that I’ve been out of work, I haven’t been writing code daily like I normally do. I remember the key points - ways to approach solving the big problems. But I haven’t really thought about the little things that are normally like muscle memory for me.

To use the metaphor of racing in the Tour de France, in the interview that day I was expecting to talk about how to conserve energy in a crosswind echelon. And the interviewer instead asked questions like “do you get on the bike from the right side or the left?” and “at a stoplight, is it better to stand up or stay seated?” The level of questions were such that I would have to actually do the activity to answer the question; the details have been in my “muscle memory” so long I don’t consciously think of them anymore.

Now what?

So how do I fix this problem? I put together a training program to go through some remedial advanced training courses so it’s easier to recall the details from muscle memory. I know “remedial advanced” sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s what I’ve been doing. Yesterday I finished taking an “Advanced Python” online class. (please allow me to brag by posting my “signed” certificate of completion below)

I really didn’t learn much. The topics covered were things most people learn early on. But writing code even to solve easy quizzes was good exercise. Next I’ll take some courses to learn new stuff that’ll let my brain stretch in new directions. Hopefully, the next time I’m in the hot seat, the basics will be right where I need them.

Confirmation I haven’t forgotten it all

The new world

But it does make me wonder how interviewing is going to work in the new world of AI-assisted programming. What does it really matter if you know details of a language’s syntax? Your AI minion knows it better than you ever could, with perfect memory. At some point, an interviewer won’t be able to ask one of my field’s favorite types of questions: “Here’s some code with a bug. Find it and fix it.” The answer will be, “Look, in reality, I just tell Claude (or whatever other AI tool is popular this month) to find it and fix it. That’s work for a robot nowadays.”