Mastery is difficult to quantify, especially in terms of code or engineering cleverness. I think, what comes close, is the ability to get way more tradeoffs rig

Mastery is difficult to quantify, especially in terms of code or engineering cleverness. I think, what comes close, is the ability to get way more tradeoffs right than wrong, to hit an optimal balance. Tradeoffs in decision making when it comes to picking technologies or languages, or a certain design pattern, or an architecture, or UI/UX or whatever, when building systems. Small tradeoffs that may not look like much immediately, but pay off in the long term. Sacrificing a seemingly good feature now to avoid the pain of technical debt in the future. Many of these traits are fundamental, universal, and even philosophical, than is general perceived, and transcend technologies and stacks, and to a large extent, time. And yet, I think, the above traits can be described as good, and not really mastery in its truest sense, like in other disciplines like music or painting. Software engineering is way too diverse, fragmented, chaotic, and ever changing.