I put emphasis on tools because I've worked with a lot of recent graduates. There's the very real, practical problem of knowing what not to solve. I don't care if you're a genius or not, you're wasting time recreating (poorly) components that already exist in the standard library. Similarly if someone is doing blatantly bad-practice things because "its just implementation details" (stuff like hardcoded paths to /home/username) it causes a bunch of extra effort to clean up the monstrosity.
That's not to say problem solving is not extremely important, but the time suck created by bad tool use (or not using tools out of ignorance of their existence) ultimately reduces the productivity of a programmer, or in some cases, whole teams.
> Similarly if someone is doing blatantly bad-practice things because "its just implementation details" (stuff like hardcoded paths to /home/username) it causes a bunch of extra effort to clean up the monstrosity.
Agreed. There's definitely a balance point there - I remember when I got to the point that I not only recognized that this a bad idea, but where they actively started bothering me even for one-off scripts. Something as simple as setting them as constants at the top of the script makes that feeling mostly go away and requires almost no extra effort when implementing.
There are many times when I think "This is really brittle. Surely there's a better way to do it...", which is usually quickly followed by "I'll figure out that better way later, for now, just isolate it and make a note to fix it when this is done."
That's not to say problem solving is not extremely important, but the time suck created by bad tool use (or not using tools out of ignorance of their existence) ultimately reduces the productivity of a programmer, or in some cases, whole teams.