[lordnacho]

Agree. A lot of coding is simply banging your head against the wall, search SO over and over, changing things around, until it does what you want.

Raw algo quizzing skill isn't necessarily the same thing, though you'd think it was somewhat related because when you're learning to code up "find longest continuous run" you also need to change things around for a bit.

Difference is in real life there's never an end. The algo quiz leaves you at some optimum eventually due to being quite a small thing.

[bulditand]

Coding is the easiest part. Understanding the actual problem and solving it is the hard part.

> A lot of coding is simply banging your head against the wall, search SO over and over, changing things around, until it does what you want.

It doesn't look like programming to me. Yes, sometimes we miss something, so our code doesn't do exactly what we want it to do, but when we realize it we just fix the code. This view of coding resembles an improved way to write Shakespeare with monkeys.

[jcadam]

> A lot of coding is simply banging your head against the wall, search SO over and over, changing things around, until it does what you want.

I don't find myself in these situations nearly as often as I did back when I was a junior engineer. But damn, I'm sure I looked busier (and more stressed out) back then.

[ams6110]

I was mostly through that phase of my career before any of those things were available. Toward the end of it, stack overflow had just launched. I mostly relied on printed books for help with languages and frameworks I was using.