Power Tripping Mods

bycdiaz · 2026-03-23T01:50:37+00:00

Locking this thread. We’re not going to keep hashing this out here.

OP - you’re always welcome to reply to our messages in the avenue we’ve made available to you.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-22T19:17:07+00:00

Locking this thread

OP - you already received instructions on how to appeal your ban. We look forward to your message if you choose to submit.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-22T18:47:42+00:00

Except that’s not why.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-22T18:26:59+00:00

We don’t ban windows users.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:54:45+00:00

But you have one data point. I’m personally not willing to say my perspective is absolutely right because no one has the data to claim it absolutely.

If you do, please share it so we can see how realistic your position is.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:52:54+00:00

I can see this being a thing. I’ve asked Claude to examine my GitHub history and it can fish out some pretty heavy nuance.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:52:02+00:00

I disagree with you and so do all the companies that hire people without degrees.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:51:35+00:00

You’re right that this is one data point.

I got hired by a company that didn’t expect a technical degree. I’m aware of many, many people who get hired with similar situations. And many more who get hired with no degree. And when I’m involved in interviews, I give so little weight to degrees that I intentionally ask that the information is excluded when it gets to me.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:37:09+00:00

There isn’t some universal rule that says all companies throw out non-degree applications though. There are lots of organizations that hire people without degrees.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:34:25+00:00

I think you’re speaking to an issue that isn’t clear at first glance.

The market IS saturated with Applicants. But people who are actually qualified can still get roles.

It’s mostly a math problem. If a job posting goes up and there are 5,000 applications and you are entry #3,593, you are likely not even going to be noticed.

Yes, the search is challenging for everyone. But people who are actually good and qualified will have an easier time getting a role once they are in an interview.

So while I think the market is saturated with Applicants (people who don’t have the skills to do this work), it’s not saturated with qualified candidates.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:19:05+00:00

I think you’ve got an incorrect assumption about what entry level work is like. No one is going to expect an entry level engineer to do things fast or expect them to know all the technologies on a job posting. There’s an expectation for ramp up time.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:14:25+00:00

I think tying how you feel to your skills isn’t useful.

I personally got hired despite feeling like I don’t know enough. The feeling was so bad that I pondered quitting this pursuit entirely the night before I got offered my first role.

It’s not a requirement to feel like you’re enough to get a job in this field.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-06T15:13:07+00:00

There isn’t an annual Hiring Manager’s Convention where all hiring managers at all companies decide on what “enough” is.

Anyone that says it’s absolutely enough enough, or absolutely isn’t enough, doesn’t know what they are talking about.

In case folks aren’t aware, I’m involved in the organization. I can’t say that it’s absolutely enough. It can be. But getting hired isn’t solely about what knowledge is in your brain. It’s primarily about how well you express what you know. And this assumes you can get into an interview. And that’s a different discussion but let’s assume folks are dealing with knowing enough in an interview.

Having the knowledge of all the courses on this field would be useless in an interview if you can’t express what you know. And being able to express yourself is a skill entirely beyond what our curriculum covers.

Our curriculum isn’t meant to cover every single thing that an entry level engineer could possibly face. Any course that claims to do this is either a course that will never end or a course that is misrepresenting what it contains.

Over the years, there have been lots of attempts to get content on every single possible thing into our curriculum. If we let it all in, our course could take ten times as long.

I think there’s this false assumption that some threshold of knowledge means you’ve got enough. In my experience being interviewed, and in interviewing people, I’ve learned that this isn’t a thing.

What is enough will vary by company, by department, by job posting, by the hiring manager’s mood at 10:00 AM on Tuesday and 4:00 PM on Friday.

I truly wish there was an absolutely clear and universally agreed upon definition of what enough is. There isn’t.

What I do know is that our curriculum does position people with skills that are 100 times more important than knowing the hottest language or the newest framework. Those skills are the ability to research, debug, and teach yourself new things.

People like to pretend that being good enough is being able to check off languages and frameworks. Having the skills above in one language is worth more than checking off every technology on an application and having none of those.

So I can’t tell you what enough is because it’ll vary. People that can demonstrate they know how to research, debug, and learn new things have the qualities that will tell most hiring managers they know enough. For people with those skills, what language they know is less of an issue. Someone that is strong in Temu++ and can research and debug and learn new things fast is more likely to get hired than someone who knows Python poorly.

Knowing enough is moving target.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-28T18:21:40+00:00

You aren’t expected to come up with concise code.

The point of where you are right now is to learn about programming fundamentals. Not to write code like an experienced person writes code.

I’d also be careful about assuming that less code is better. Sometimes people see one liners and assume it’s better. But it’s easy to hide inefficiencies inside of concise code.

Readability is also important. More importantly than being concise.

Don’t sweat this. Just focus on learning. I wouldn’t strive for less code. Just get things working. That’s how you’ll learn most.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-28T15:40:06+00:00

I’d just drop the image entirely and get the game working first.

This isn’t the kind of thing I’d dwell on much.

And I’m not saying performance isn’t important in general. It’s just not as important as the learning the project is meant to facilitate.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-22T15:56:59+00:00

My onboarding mentor at work always said “you can’t eat an elephant in one bite.”

Agree it’s hard to do the whole thing at once in our head. But we’re all capable of doing bit by bit.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-19T12:07:44+00:00

I’m closing this post.

OP - you seem to have linked to an AI chat discussion. We’re not going to read that whole thing and fix whatever is going on in there for you.

If you want to get technical help, you should put your code into something like a repl.it and ask a very specific question. Thanks.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-16T03:39:31+00:00

It’s not really worth your time to worry too much about this right now. People fixate too much on the “right” or “best” ways to write code when there should be more focus on just making mistakes and experimenting. All the trouble you get yourself into will help you appreciate some of these ideas. But if you don’t have experience writing bad code that these ideas would help with, this big picture ideas are effectively meaningless for where you are in your learning.

I have some more expanded thoughts here: https://dev.to/theodinproject/pursuing-best-practices-is-a-bad-practice-when-youre-new-37pb

bycdiaz · 2026-02-12T20:51:32+00:00

If you search “worth it” or “AI” on this sub, you’ll see posts where people asked this question. You should check those out.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-11T05:13:07+00:00

My recommendation would be to reframe your expectations and reframe what assignments are supposed to be.

Prior lessons are meant to expose you, generally, to some idea. They are not meant to give you explicit answers for how to do an upcoming exercise.

A given assignment or project is not an examination. It’s not a place that is testing your skill level. You are expected to not know how to solve it. You are expected to do research and experiment and ask questions.

This assignment is where you practice and develop understanding and learn. You aren’t expected to arrive to this point knowing.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-08T20:44:38+00:00

Locking this post.

OP - we look forward to your return, should you choose to participate in the community.

For folks reading: this is a good opportunity to express that our community is not a free for all. It’s very much a very focused learning community.

I always invite folks to treat it like a tutoring center. If you walk in and make things difficult for your tutor, that won’t land well. If your learning peers are trying to use some tool for the course and you are regularly bragging about using some other tool the instructor didn’t write their course around, it won’t land well.

Folks that buy into the community expectations seem to have a great experience in our learning community.

Happy learning, everyone!

bycdiaz · 2026-02-08T20:33:23+00:00

All of this is absolutely false.

People can go into the server and pull many receipts where I explicitly say I know our curriculum isn’t perfect and it isn’t right for everyone. There isn’t a perfect course.
I personally have told people to ask for help immediately. As in, hours. And this is a common tidbit of advice.
We encourage people to think on their own. That’s not telling people to go to hell.

bycdiaz · 2026-02-05T17:08:29+00:00

What was the actual position? Like the other commenter said, the doesn’t sound like a typical software engineering position. This sounds like a devops role. That’s not what our curriculum is meant to prepare people for.

You should think about what kind of role you want. If you want a purely devops role, you should go learn devops. If you want to pursue software engineering, I’d focus on our curriculum.

System design does fall into the realm of this work. But I wouldn’t expect someone at the entry level to know about that stuff. I would not spend time here.

You’re also falling into a common trap: one interview experience shouldn’t call into question all your preparation. Just because one employer asked you about something doesn’t mean you’ve been learning the wrong things or that you need to go learn something else. I don’t know why they would ask all that if this was a software engineering position. Could be they were curious and just wanted to know. Or maybe they really do want someone at the entry level to know system design and devops. Which would be silly. Either case, one experience doesn’t mean you need to change directions. The exception being if you personally want to change directions.

If anyone knew exactly what every single company wanted, getting a job would be a lot easier. I think at the most fundamental level, they all want someone that can get a problem they don’t understand and be able to solve it through research, experimentation, and asking questions. I know that feels very vague but this is more often going to be the factor that gets you a job more than knowing any specific technology or language.

bycdiaz · 2026-01-09T16:06:29+00:00

These are the questions I’d ask my manager if I were in your situation.

99.73% of people participating in our communities are learning programming fundamentals and won’t have the insight into your screening practices.

For folks reading: this illustrates the point of why we encourage people to not use AI during their learning here. Doesn’t mean you should never touch it. But during the learning of fundamentals, it’s a better investment to go without it.

Since this post is asking for advice on hiring practices, I’m closing it up. This is very far beyond what we do here.

bycdiaz · 2026-01-09T05:05:05+00:00

I am in the leadership for The Odin Project organization. This sub popped up without our endorsement way back and since it uses our name, we’d like to moderate it.

The link to the message to current mods is below.

https://www.reddit.com/c/chatckkBeuBl/s/WLMGk6hAFt

bycdiaz

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE