Do you really need a CS degree to make that kind of judgement? Even before I was college-aged I knew (and so did several of my programming friends) about hash t

Do you really need a CS degree to make that kind of judgement? Even before I was college-aged I knew (and so did several of my programming friends) about hash tables and how much faster they were than just iterating through something and checking. I didn't know Big-O but I did have a loose understanding that told me iterating through EVERYTHING is slow, and that there are smarter ways to look up values. This sounds like a case of a programmer using the wrong datatype, realizing it, and then being too lazy to fix it.