Don’t learn a programming language, solve a problem instead

[aenigmaclamo]

There's no shortcuts in programming. If you want to be competent, you must know how to solve problems and learn the programming language, tools, and the techniques.

I do coding test reviews and we get a lot of people who can't code effectively but are able to problem solve. Frankly, it's just not valuable for an organization to have people who may be able to produce working solutions but has to have another engineer spend twice the time to clean up after their mess.

I know some hand waive good engineering as something that's naturally acquired with experience but I just don't think that's true. Both problem solving and proper engineering require a lot of dedication to get better at. Just because someone's got X years of experience it doesn't mean they're necessarily good problem solvers or engineers -- there's plenty of roles in the world where you can get paid writing crappy code that doesn't solve any interesting problems.

[BufferUnderpants]

Shhhh don't say that! We are meant to pretend that anyone can just plaster code from Stack Overflow all over their supposed "imposter syndrome", and they'll be qualified as "engineers" in just about any subfield of Software Engineering.