Yeah, I mean, I'm also a self-taught, workaday programmer, and I agree with you. Understanding time complexity to a degree that you can communicate about it isn

Yeah, I mean, I'm also a self-taught, workaday programmer, and I agree with you. Understanding time complexity to a degree that you can communicate about it isn't something to shrug off. Don't be proud of ignorance. The problem is that the perspective expressed by the GP comment is a pure expression of the "don't know what you don't know" adage. Sure, you can hammer out solutions to problems, but the more exposure you've got to more concepts in your field, 1. the bigger your toolkit and 2. the quicker you can start drawing conclusions about the problem. I'm actually pretty shocked someone's confessing to not knowing what big O notation is and proud of it.