I would get assessed by a psychologist if you really think your slow. You might get surprised and just find out your actually not. Or your smart and meticulou

I would get assessed by a psychologist if you really think your slow. You might get surprised and just find out your actually not. Or your smart and meticulous (more accurate, but slower), something pretty common in software engineers. Software requires high preciseness, being loose and sloppy quickly gets filtered out. The example you cite sounds like a lack of experience with the library set. The reason it's a 10s fix is because he's seen that shit before, not because he's smarter. The engineer is applying a heuristic, the heuristic was correct and thus they solved it quickly. You start to notice general error patterns in computers from experience, and certain error patterns in certain libraries or programming languages. For example, I notice a stutter in a UI application. My guess when I see that is something is probably being processed on the main thread that takes too long, because I've seen that before in my own programs. I've just reduced my search space significantly. My heuristic might be incorrect, and my search time becomes larger.