Learning happens on the job. At work, problems present themselves and wait. There are no right answers, you have to learn to think on your own to solve them.

Ibrahim Diallo

A developer reflects on how real-world work, not formal education, taught them to think like a programmer. Starting with a warehouse job where they built a receipt-scanning automation system using VBScript and OCR, they describe how tackling unfamiliar, ungraded problems changed their problem-solving mindset. The contrast drawn is between school optimizing for tests and grades versus work handing you broken or unknown things and simply waiting for a solution. The key insight: learning to sit with unfamiliar problems and pull them apart is the real skill that work teaches.

It's Work that taught me how to think