"Willing to learn as needed" needs to be reserved for things like specific frameworks, which can be picked up quickly if you understand the concepts they're bui

"Willing to learn as needed" needs to be reserved for things like specific frameworks, which can be picked up quickly if you understand the concepts they're built on and have done something similar. Pointers are a core concept, and in particular, they're one of the weed-out points of CS curricula. Sure, you can get some things done without them, but they're critical for understanding bugs or performance issues that arise due to the underlying implementation, and likely to take more time to understand than things that usually fall into the category of "learning as needed on the job".