I've never solved any LeetCode problems.
I've never gotten grades above 80% in my academics.
I've never taken an online course in anything.
I've never gotten any certifications other than my Master's degree.
I've never written a CV for a job application.

How the fuck did I manage to survive for 7 years in this industry?

I'm mostly intrigued how you got your first job? I kinda get it once you're in the industry, you know people so you get interviews, and if you're good/doing real work you don't need to practice too much.

@atheist First job was from Indeed.com. I learned PHP, HTML, CSS and JS, put that on a resume. And started sending it out. (2017)

Imagine having @ostream as a psychologist:
"Stop whining you Prozac-tard!!"

@ostream sure, you have a master degree of psychological instability

@ostream sorry for oversimplifying the matter. Didn’t think it would bother you as you have a tendency to oversimplify everything as well 😉

@SidTheITGuy “fake it until you make it “.

If you fake it good enough you will probably do a better job than many with a better education :)

Just having the right attitude would put you above a few people I have worked with.

I can teach anyone to write code, but I cannot teach them to think so if they have the thinking working … :)

@Voxera sounds like ur hitting on me :D

Also I'm a little sad that you said fake it until you make it. I dont fake anything about my skillset. My YouTube channel is right in my profile. You can check my skills if you want.

@ostream just got off the phone with my lawyers. We’ve got a strong defense

I’ve been industry almost 30 years and never ever been asked a Leetcode style problem.
I’ve worked at 9 companies and interviewed at more.

I’ve found it far far more valuable to understand good software architecture and OO.

@SidTheITGuy I am sorry, the “fake it” was sort of based on your first post where you more or less claimed no real experience.

And I have a quite similar background in that I had very little to show :)

I never went to university or high school and was mostly self learned.

Today I think I am the only one in the 80+ strong IT department without a higher education and I am still part of the architectural team purely based on experience.

I do very much understand the “imposter syndrome“ ;)

@jestdotty it's good to see that you're getting to know me lol.

@TrevorTheRat how about both? It’s hard to have a deep understanding of OOD, OOA, and OOP without having the raw experience of doing it.

I’m wondering how, for 30 years, you have never written anything that makes someone else go “holy shit, how did you do that” or “that can’t be done..” and show it working.

Twice in my career now I have shown Apple software engineers (while in the Apple campus) something that their subsystems could do (and do well) that they previously thought impossible.

Are you sure that after 30 years are you not just discounting impressive code you have written as “easy” after you did it? It’s kind of natural to do that…

@xcodesucks

Yeah maybe. There have been times when people have said “I would’ve never thought of that”.

I just meant the return on investment I got from learning OO was more than from learning algorithms.

I do find that stuff far more interesting than I used to now though and they can be fun