The statement seemed anything but obtuse to me; to me it highlights one of the bigger problems that people who hire have, finding someone who is able to "meta u

The statement seemed anything but obtuse to me; to me it highlights one of the bigger problems that people who hire have, finding someone who is able to "meta up", someone who sees not just problems, but classes of problems and how to systematically classify problems and derive suitable systems that can solve those problems in a generic way. In other words, write programs to write programs (an obvious case of which is a compiler).