I once told a friend of mine that I find "high level thinking" easy. He scoffed at me asking: "how is that easy?" In my job, high level thinking is that you lo

I once told a friend of mine that I find "high level thinking" easy. He scoffed at me asking: "how is that easy?" In my job, high level thinking is that you look at a diagram with at most 10 different concepts that you already vaguely know, and on a high level that is good enough. For example (I'm making this up): - You have a client sending a request - Which has a server receiving it that relays the request to the specific service - But before that happens it is sent to the auth service and the auth service responds back to the server that the user is logged in - The server then relays it to the specific service that the request needed to go to - That particular service needs some info from yet a different service - That different service sends it to the service - The service sends everything back to the service - The server does some final serialization (e.g. no silly fields should leak to the client) and sends it to the client This is the most elaborate example I could think of, most of the time it's a lot easier, but I also find this type of thinking easy. He responded with: oh that's not what I meant with high level thinking. In our case we need to know specifically: what protocols are being used (is it TCP or UDP, why?), how do services make each other known (e.g. broadcasting?), what component lives where in the world? And so on. It turns out that my thinking was too high level and relatively useless in the field that he works in (he doesn't have anything to do with web dev and does something more low level, more performance related and more network related). So that was quite an experience for the both of us that we meant something different with "high level" and that statements such as "I find xyz easy" can come across as very arrogant to the other person because to them you're kind of saying something impossible.