It's Work that taught me how to think

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.