Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems
Think of it this way: application development, software engineering, and computer science (and data science and ... etc) sometimes use the same tools but are all different disciplines.<p>Universities traditionally focused on Computer Science and their graduates would often need a lot of grooming before they could really be independently and reliably productive in the commercial words of application development or software engineering. Importantly, it was less grooming than someone who studied something like English or Sociology or History, but it was still a different discipline than what the job market demanded.<p>You jumped into the job market directly. You learned to develop applications, research API&#x27;s, study trends, and participate as a team member in development workflows under commercial pressure. You don&#x27;t know how to compose and compare sort functions for abstract sets of N elements because you never needed to. You just use sort().<p>And that&#x27;s okay! Inventing new algorithms with theoretical significance is not your job! You have other skills and they&#x27;re of much more immediate value!