Interesting and fair perspective — but I don’t think having these questions in the beginning of my journey meant I didn’t have the potential to be a good engineer or a problem solver. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand it — and a surface-level understanding will usually not suffice. That’s why I had all of these questions on day 1. I wasn’t really learning from the computer-graded exercises that focused on syntax, and I wanted to talk through each programming challenge before tackling it.

My point, really, was that a new developer can sit there and memorize how to do something, but they won’t learn to solve problems this way. They might be able to follow a tutorial and copy someone else’s app, but personally, I don’t learn that way. I learn by looking at the desired end result and reverse engineering it until I figure out where to start and how to break the problem down.