> Moreover, Hastings thinks that an exceptional technologist’s abilities extend beyond coding or debugging faster than an “average” colleague: It’s also about t

> Moreover, Hastings thinks that an exceptional technologist’s abilities extend beyond coding or debugging faster than an “average” colleague: It’s also about the ability to tackle more abstract problems. “The reason the rock-star engineer is so much more valuable than his counterparts isn’t unique to programming,” he wrote. “The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can’t.” I feel like an objective analysis of me as a software engineer is that I'm the opposite of this. Maybe because I've not been doing it long, maybe because I'm a bootcamp kid, who knows. I'd like to be that kind of engineer, though. The one that whacks out some mind-boggling fix to problems. I work with a woman like that. She just... figures it out. I don't know how to explain it. Like one time we had to build an SQL AST represented by the DOM, and she put down this recursive series of components that to this day I have trouble explaining to new people on the project. I want that skill. If it's talent, fine, but I've yet to find things I can't learn through sheer brute force if necessary. This one, though, I haven't found the brute force solution to.