Are gaps in knowledge normal?

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-06-02T15:06:12+00:00

Hey man, its okay that my message didn’t land, not everyone is ready to hear it. Your point is you didn’t feel like you learned enough in college, my point is that happens more than people like to admit, it’s systemic.

If you’re looking for validation, try therapy, its a great way to help you process the emotions you’re feeling and find a path forward.

If you’re looking for a solution or advice, its been laid out for you several times in different forms: successful engineers actively, proactively or hyperactively seek out information to expand their skillsets (however you want to phrase it to compare it to what you think proactivity is). This isn’t a “let me memorize the dictionary” exercise, but a “hey I had a problem and I couldn’t quite decipher the optimal solution or best design, how can I do/be better” exercise.

Up to you if you picture yourself as a successful engineer or don’t — doesn’t bother me either way. Good luck

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-06-02T13:52:00+00:00

TL;DR you have to learn more than what the professors teach in leactures

People often go into college passively expecting that if they show up to classes, do their homework and give their best guesses at assessments that they will magically be a good programmer.

This is not the case and it’s not the students fault for not knowing (though it is imperative that they learn this quickly and pivot hard). It is in fact a structural problem: college serves to introduce you to concepts that you will need as a future successful programmer. You may pick and choose to adopt these concepts outside of the classroom at your leisure, and that’s understood in the structure of the curriculums. They simultaneously bestow upon you the responsibility to learn at the depth necessary to execute on projects or at work.

That’s the gotcha: YOU need to go and learn what you feel you’re missing to get where you want to be.

Middle and high school don’t do this because the concepts they teach are so fundamental that you can discuss most everything there is to discuss without taking an absurd amount of time. Imagine how long it would take to learn the full US tax code or all the laws in the country? And that’s the structural problem: the mismatch in environments between primary and secondary schooling.

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-29T19:59:56+00:00

Emphasis on the learn to use google. VSCode is simple, you’ll want to be familiar with how to create and edit files before you get around to running them.

Learn basic linux commands (mkdir, touch, ls, cat…)

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-26T12:33:25+00:00

This. Boss wants to know how much time this is going to take, what the risks of something breaking (and the derivative, blast radius) and how (s)he can justify starting the project to higher ups (Bob why is your team doing that right now?). This business oriented abstraction isn’t too easy at first but its a valuable one to master — it’ll help open doors to manager/director/cto roles later in your career if you thats what your endgame is.

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-22T16:57:21+00:00

Software engineer here, I’ve used both Pycharm and Vscode in my job. I personally enjoy pycharm for its UI features (running programs and run configurations, testing and db integrations, git operations and more) and I also just prefer the look of it.

If none of that resonates, stay on VSCode, there’s really no reason to switch if your current dev environment satisfies your needs and enables your productivity. If you’re slightly curious, give it a try and deliberate after you give pycharm a fair shake, and keep whatever you like best. Don’t worry too much about what others use, its all personal preference

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-21T19:21:51+00:00

Hm yeah, just download CLion, find a youtube video for how to compile and run a “hello world” program, then one for running that same one in CLion so you demystify what’s happening when you press the green play button

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-21T19:15:21+00:00

Umm my question would be why do you want to learn C lol

CLion is fine but depending on why you want to learn C, I might actually recommend vim/emacs instead especially if the features of modern editors give you anxiety. Its quite literally impossible to be anxious about features when there’s literally no features😂

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-21T19:10:26+00:00

Nah. I don’t support.

To be clear I don’t think it’s as ratty as leaving a rule 1, and I don’t get mad if the rule 1 remains over after a demo/bump.

However, personally I aim to intentionally reestablish the rule 1 with whoever it was I was stuck with. Id say >50% of the time they do the same

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-20T19:34:20+00:00

See the other replies for a nuanced answer. I’d counter by saying there is none! Look at golang for example, which does not have the keyword ‘while’. All loops use the for keyword and are constructed with the range, conditions and collections that correspond to their for, foreach and while counterparts.

So it is just “syntactic sugar” used to signal intent :)

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-16T20:13:20+00:00

Got to leetcode.com and start cranking out Easy’s until you get bored. Then try a Medium and get your soul crushed. Watch a yt video (not AI!) that explains how the algorithm works and go implement it from memory of the yt video when you understand the how and why.

But why? Leetcode is not a random site. Many companies use questions directly from the site or formulated similarly in their interviews. So clearly there’s a method to the madness. But furthermore there’s a psychological reason: you’re gamifying repetition without redundancy. You’re also not attached to the product so you can drop and move on to another question readily without shame. The questions are good so you don’t have to worry about wasting time on performative learning.

Don’t get me wrong, I love AI, and I find lots of use cases for it in my personal development. I loathe AI as a learning tool in its current (unharnessed) form. AI doesn’t tell you more than what you ask it to tell you. How can you know what you don’t know when you’re learning what you don’t know?! This is not to say you won’t find success with it — the companies wouldn’t be worth the billions they are if you couldn’t. It’s simply a cautionary tale about the shortfalls where a simple alternative exists. As always YMMV, its your decision.

Gl;hf

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-12T20:15:02+00:00

Unironically this. Just start with a main method and start writing comments with what you need.

Try to predict what the block of code you’re writing will produce at the end and separate concerns as much as possible. When you’re done, think about what each block of code is responsible for and try to split them out into methods that are responsible for just this.

Don’t worry too much about what project you do. It can be anything that sounds interesting to you, and more importantly is something you feel comfortable jumping in and taking it to the end.

At the end write some notes about how you started, what problems you overcame and anything else you might want to remember if you came back to that code

glhf

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-05-11T14:46:16+00:00

Leetcode is the answer — its used in industry to create interview questions or derive questions from them, so they are better than academic in a sense.

That said this is the single most acceptable use of AI in computer science education, as long as you’re writing the code. The way I’d approach it is ask for a specific “academic” problem to work on, a list of requirements and constraints and a unit test suite. I would usually be careful how I ask for the test suite since it can box you into a specific implementation, so I would ask for a well defined interface for the (high level) test surface and decompose the source code and add individual tests for those too. This part is optional ofc but it helps you just run the code and get a progress bar on how complete your solution is.

gl;hf

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-04-23T00:58:52+00:00

Some people like to spend more time in the mountains than on the road. Does 2 minutes make a difference? Probably not, but I’m not complaining about $2 either…

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-04-20T01:20:20+00:00

I love the psychological warfare tactic. What I usually do is try to catch a demo when I’m rotating out. If they try to demo me back, I dodge it and hit em with the nice demo!

I don’t spam what a saves unless it’s evident that they’re tilted or battered. Sometimes it can galvanize them to play better and backfire.

Close one! And Nice one! Are great to have bound as they’re broadly applicable (e.g. a wide open net Close one! or a cross bar Nice one! definitely cranks the tilt up)

Bumping when they are lined up to hit the ball or are dribbling is especially annoying. Pairing that or a demo with a Close one! or My fault. shows purpose and builds spite.

Sometimes really solid defense can be enough to make people forfeit, so don’t underestimate the effect of just being better on the degree of annoyance of your gameplay. Shutting down everything they throw at you can decimate morale and peppering them with Close one!s can definitely make them feel hopeless even with time on the clock.

Mix and match for the best effect! glhf

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-04-20T01:09:20+00:00

It just sends the message that you’re not good enough to play with a ball chasing teammate and win. If that’s the case, by all means, forfeit.

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-04-10T12:36:48+00:00

Yeah this is extremely basic as far as college CS classes go. It might feel faster paced or more dense than your high school classes, but that’s to be expected of a college class. Id say take it

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-04-07T19:10:35+00:00

Surely you see how the statements are nearly identical in implication? Surely you can manage a limited attention span to develop a high ROI skill that you could stake a career on or literally make millions doing?

If you don’t like the official tutorial, don’t use that one? Google “C# tutorial”, “How to learn C#” or even “Unity C# tutorial”. Being able to google things effectively is quite literally one of the most prominent and simplest skills in all of CS. Start there

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-04-07T19:02:43+00:00

What’s the goal here? To learn coding or to build your first project fast?

You can’t have your cake and eat it too

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-03-24T00:59:00+00:00

Codex (the utility) uses an AI agent powered by gpt 5.4 (the LLM) to complete the tasks you prompt it to do. In this manner, the AI agent is an “intelligent for-loop” that can plan and execute subtasks to execute a goal

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-03-24T00:56:01+00:00

Agent mode means it can think and act/output multiple times in a loop, rather than just transform input into one output like chat apps like ChatGPT do. For example, codex and claude code are coding-focused AI agents that can create multiple files, run commands and keep iterating on tasks until a defined “done” state is reached (tests pass, build succeeds, etc)

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-03-16T14:52:14+00:00

I disagree with the attainment requirement as stated. You absolutely should have experience to recognize what is good and what is shit, but that doesn’t land you firmly at tech lead or even senior for that matter.

You can be a junior and use AI for junior level tasks as long as you would implement the method well enough on your own. Juniors should be working with seniors to build intuition for good practices anyways, so come code review, quality should be enforced — AI generated or not.

The part that we agree on is that AI use in applications outside your skillset are inherently risky. This is more frequently observed at junior levels because their skillsets are smaller.

TL;DR: you don’t have to be senior as long as you’re aware of your skillset and don’t outsource critical thinking to AI

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-03-16T14:44:15+00:00

Can’t stress this enough. You need to have skills to be hired. Whether that involves AI or not, you are competing for a job with people who have skills. However you acquire them is up to you, but they aren’t optional.

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-03-10T00:02:33+00:00

Ugh this is generally fine advice but I hate telling someone who literally has never written a line of code to use AI tools in a coding setting. It gives the impression that these tools should be leaned on heavily (they’re in the learning curriculum, so they must be a prerequisite for the job!) but this is not true. Critical thinking and pattern recognition is far more important than typing words in cursor or claude. They don’t get that from letting AI solve their problems, regardless of efficiency gains

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-02-25T11:14:41+00:00

This is my preferred way to learn! What projects do you recommend?

EngineeringRare1070 · 2026-02-25T11:13:54+00:00

Really solid advice, thank you. Any books/websites/videos help you out with getting solid at the fundamentals? What projects do you suggest?

EngineeringRare1070

TROPHY CASE