I felt kind of like that first few years of my programming experience - I could hack all kinds of things on my own (in assembler, c, vb), but then someone asked

I felt kind of like that first few years of my programming experience - I could hack all kinds of things on my own (in assembler, c, vb), but then someone asked me a basic datastructure or algo problem and I would blank out. Or asked me some stupid OOP problem... granted cs education back in the day wasn’t quite as formal but still. Anyways, I’d say don’t get discouraged, learn new technologies, get out of your VB and .net and Microsoft cocoon and try new things. Maybe take a cs algo and distributed computing course and read up a book or two.