The funniest of them all was a woman (don't get me wrong but... thing are the way they are) who couldn't find the modulo result and wrote a small function which iteratively subtracted one operand from the other until it hit zero or a negative value and took the decision from there on. Isn't this exactly the sort of programmer you would want to hire? She wasn't incompetent, like you claim, just ignorant. But despite her ignorance she figured out a way to calculate the modulus anyway. Programming is about solving problems. Later you may learn an easier way to solve that problem but the important thing is to have a problem solving ability to start with.