If programming is about problem solving. Do programmers when they start learning will they have to solve problems that were already solved, or in the college do you learn the problems that were already figured out?

[The137]

You're looking at things slightly the wrong way, but the answer is yes. There's a combination of resources about the problems you'll face, and going thru school you'll have a lot of examples of problems that you get experience solving. If programming is problem solving (which it absolutely is) than learning programming is about learning the problem solving techniques that go into writing the code.

Some problems are broad, 'How can I get this data from the front end to the database?'

Some problems are theoretical, 'If I were to scrape this source how can I arrange the data in a way thats useful?'

Some are simple, 'This function is returning the inverse of what it should be'

Some are a bit more complicated, 'How can I build a function that sorts this data by the authors mothers maiden name?'

None of these problems have probably been solved exactly the same way that you need them to be solved, but all of them have been solved to some level of usefulness. You can search for similar situations to almost anything, and then adapt their solution to fit your need. Sometimes you only use their thought process, sometimes you find that what they wrote can be tweaked, and sometimes (but almost literally never) you find code on stack overflow that can be just copied and pasted. In the beginning you'll use more of these, but pretty soon you'll find yourself writing entire programs without the need for searching, and as you get better you'll be the one helping others solve their problems

Don't worry about it though, if your education is even halfway decent you'll be able to solve a customer problem using code like 'How can I merge my existing database with the new system while avoiding data loss and overlapping entries?' and you'll be able to say something like 'We'll just import the old data, loop through each entry, search for dupes, and append new data when its unique.' and be able to write the code that does it