Can I get a Developer Job Without learning DSA?

I know HTML/CSS and basic JS along with little DOM manipulation and I can make layouts and do websites but I lack this DSA knowledge and I’m terrified by those boooring bull ****

Data structures and algorithms are what programming is!

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I am not talking about great dev such as yourself. I am just a normal guy.

I’m talking about ‘just normal programming’. Programmers use data structures and algorithms all the time. Data structures and algorithms is just a fancy way to say ‘things we use a bunch when solving problems with code’.

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Yeah, I think people can get a little hyperbolic about DSA, but the idea is important.

And don’t think that you need to be an expert in it all. Not everyone needs to know how to find the shortest path through a graph. But you should know how to reverse a string. You should know how to do a binary search and a few sorting algorithms. You should be able to generate prime numbers and find LCMs and GCDs, etc. If you can’t do fizz-buzz then you won’t even get in the door.

To answer your question, " Can I get a Developer Job Without learning DSA?" Sure. But it is extremely unlikely. Can a person whose never played golf before get a hole-in-one? Sure. It’s possible.

DSA are an important part of being a programmer. They are often a way to test a developer in interviews. I don’t think I ever got an advanced DSA on an interview. I had to rotate an nXn matrix once. I think I had a few basic things with linked lists. I think everything else was just dealing with arrays and strings - nothing too out there. (This was all when interviewing for entry level positions.)

And DSA are frustrating when you start out. Don’t assume that everyone is just sailing through these easily. Everyone struggles on something, many struggle on a lot of them. But you don’t get big muscles by lifting feathers. You do it by lifting heavy things that hurt.

DSA will train your “coder brain” and make you a better coder. They will also increase your odds of getting hired. And in some cases, they will save you a lot of work. Will you need them a bunch? It depends on what you do. Some people use them every day. Me? In 4 years of coding I’ve probably done 4-5 of what I would consider “standard” algorithms. But when I needed them, they saved my life. And the process of learning DSA in general made me a much better coder in general.

Work on DSA. It will be a struggle. You will not get it all “perfectly” the first time. It will be an ongoing side-project. It may even become fun after a while.

And remember that there is more to coding to DSA. There are great coders out there that struggle with DSA. But I don’t think there aren’t any great coders out there that haven’t done the work to at least learn the basics of DSA. You don’t have to become an expert in advanced DSA, but you do need the basics.

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So when you say you “do websites”, you mostly do this to transfer information, e.g. from the website creator to the website visitor.
How do you save this information? As data.

When you do small websites, you probably mix data, styles etc. into one big bunch of code, because you want to stay simple (and lazy), but doing this with bigger projects leads to a lot of pains.

This is when you start to add some sort of separation of concerns.
E.g. you would store your raw data in an appropriate data format, add some business logic to generate visitor-facing webpages etc.

Therefore to know what best fits your use case to store your data, you should at least know which kinds of data storing exist.

And then you should know how to use this data to solve some business problems. This is why you want to know some popular algorithms.

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