[yura]

In my experience it’s not supposed to be that hard, unless you’re working at the cutting edge or on really hard problems. But from what you’ve written it seems like you’re struggling with basic stuff.

Maybe you’re still lacking fundamentals? Seems like your strategy so far has been to grind tutorials and crash courses. They will make you feel like you’re learning a lot in a short time but in the end you’ll still not know what you’re doing, and you’ll keep struggling when facing new problems that are outside of the scope of the tutorial.

Maybe you’re learning from low-quality resources? Yes, the internet is full of free resources but most of them are useless and actually harmful, and some curation is needed. Instead of studying the basics over and over from endless free online tutorial/courses, just learn them once, the right way, from a high-quality resource instead. See: teachyourselfcs.com

[jdefr89]

The author says he struggled with concepts that are “easy” or supposed to be. In my experience of coding since 6th grade and having been in the industry for quite some time, it’s difficult to say something is supposed to be “easy” or “hard”. The author doesn’t give many concrete examples so it’s possible he is just assuming certain things should be super easy… A lot of programmers I meet love to claim they don’t struggle with basics, then I ask them to write be a simple bubble sort or binary search from scratch and 90% cannot do it. They could only do it when they could reference or look it up. Everything thing seems “easy” after you learn it. There’s this romanticized super genius idea everyone thinks they need to live up to but that portrayal is simply fake. No one’s grasps things instantly.. I am a researcher at MIT. I work with arguably some of “smartest” people on the planet, and even they struggle with basic concepts from time to time, as does everyone. There is simply too much information for any single human to know it all, and learn new things instantly. It doesn’t happen…. Most things that should be “simple” or “easy” always end up requiring significant effort because we don’t truly know how to do something until it’s actually down. Forgive my spelling and grammar errors. I am typing on a phone and my hands are just too big to do it quickly.

[airstrike]

I don't think writing bubble sort from scratch without mistakes is necessarily a good demonstration of someone's ability to "handle the basics"

Realistically you will never need to write it yourself unless you're coding in some very specific domains

It's at most a signal for whether or not they remember algorithms 101 or some leetcode exercise, but knowing that they do remember isn't really useful to me

[hyperthesis]

Theory: "imposter syndrome" is simply seeing the truth. No one lives up to the social conception. Einstein needed help with mathematics. The realistic perspective is the curiosity of a scientist; the humility of a mortal. Knowing the premises does not automatically imply you know all the consequences... even though it "should".

Bugs have been found in production binary search.

Skipping bubblesort, I think quicksort is easy to implement, if you know Hoare's fp insight (I remembered it, but had to check it was him). Making a version that is both efficient and correct may be harder for me... Similar for Boyer-Moore substring matching (I remembered their names!)

[patrick451]

This seems like an uninteresting test. Nobody (almost) is implementing sorting algorithms in their day job. We use libraries. It's like asking people who claim to not struggle with driving basics to change their spark plugs and saying "aha, I new you were an idiot".

[rustybolt]

> I work with arguably some of “smartest” people on the planet, and even they struggle with basic concepts from time to time, as does everyone. There is simply too much information for any single human to know it all, and learn new things instantly.

This. Many programmers, for some reason, act like skill is a complete order; you are either more skilled or less skilled than someone else. In practice you are just familiar with different things, so if somebody doesn't know something that feels trivial to you, it just means he didn't encounter it in the same way.

[germandiago]

I have been giving advice to a person, young also (16 years old) and he thinks he can go very far very quickly.

I told him to be patient, to insist, to commit time learning not only typical courses of how to code your website with a database. In fact I gave him advice against doing that first.

I adviced him to learn binary/hex, algorithms, data structures and structured programming as a minimum. Also how a machine works (at least the abstract model): memory addresses, data, pc.ñ, call stack... etc. Interpeters vs compilers, some OS basics (though at first can skip most of this). My advice has been to first learn with Python and later C.

Understand why or when to use functions, certain data structures, etc. Do increasingly difficult but basic exercises.

And specifically, develop a sense and taste, at the end, on how to figure out how to code a solution to a problem he never saw. Cost analysis also helps lots and must be learnt at some point.

This is what happens when you gothrough random courses, exactly:

> Maybe you’re still lacking fundamentals? Seems like your strategy so far has been to grind tutorials and crash courses. They will make you feel like you’re learning a lot in a short time but in the end you’ll still not know what you’re doing, and you’ll keep struggling when facing new problems that are outside of the scope of the tutorial.

That is SO true. You have to start from scratch. I mean it. Because when you see something like s stacktrace that goes from Python to your native library with memory addresses you will understand NOTHING when the time comes.

Programming is a discipline where you need a lot of practice.

[I_Am_Nous]

Something I have realized with my struggles in learning how to program is that it's as much a philosophy of how we get a computer to solve a problem as it is an experience learning the structure and syntax of a new language. Coming at it from a complete newbie perspective I don't even know what I don't know, so therefore I can't begin to learn what I should. At best, I can memorize how to do basic things but I don't understand the fundamentals of how those things work, or why they were designed that way.

To be honest, I don't have an objective reason to learn much CS as that's not my layer, so I'm butting up against my own ignorance any time I try to advance in something easy. And then my ADHD determines memorizing that information is unnecessary so I struggle to get concepts to sink in.

Recently I discovered Roblox uses Lua so learning that to make silly experiences for my son sounds wonderful. It's goal oriented so I can convince myself it's worth pursuing, and I feel like Lua concepts will help expand my toolkit for the future. But I'm also not starting from a blank IDE page going "geez how do I even know what to start building first..."

[bstar77]

I've been thinking about this a bit lately and I think it's actually less about fundamentals and more of an issue with process. I'm not saying that fundamentals are not essential, but we often don't have the time to learn all aspects of a complex system.

There is definitely a lot of overlap here, but I have a finite amount of time that I can put towards solving problems. I've been thrown into AI over the past 6 months and know none of the fundamentals of this space, but I can still be very productive.

My process now is to know how to pull up docs quickly (in my editor), take advantage of the LSP, use my debugger and learn the systems on the fly. I'm probably not going to take courses in AI, Data Science and other aspects of this discipline as it will only have a marginal affect on my daily activities.

My job is to understand the flow of data, so I need to focus on that and make sure my process, tooling and access to documentation are the best possible to accomplish that.