Nodding hard at @wade_perez on this one. That gut feeling you get from messing with a carburetor is something a screen just can't teach you. Sure, a graph shows you the perfect numbers, but your ear learns the story of the engine. I kinda worry that skill is just disappearing, which sucks. We shouldn't lose that raw connection to how things actually work, you know

Honestly, that story about your buddy scares me a bit. If he never learned data structures, he might be writing slow code without even knowing it. My friend with the Shopify job wasted two weeks on a simple fix (like I mentioned before) because she didn't know hash maps. Skipping that stuff means you'll hit bigger walls later, when problems get complex and you can't just google a solution. It's like building a house on sand, sure you can move in fast, but one storm and you're sunk. Learning the basics early saves so much time and stress down the road, even if it slows you down at first.