Let me compare the ones I might've disagreed with as a newbie (out of college, maybe a few tens of hours total programming) and what I think of them now, after

Let me compare the ones I might've disagreed with as a newbie (out of college, maybe a few tens of hours total programming) and what I think of them now, after 17 years as a programmer. - "Browsing the source is almost always faster than finding an answer on [the web, Stack Overflow didn't exist yet]." This would have taken a very long time as a newbie, not being familiar with C-style languages (I was working in PL/SQL and XForms, mostly) and the architecture of big software. Nowadays, depends how many levels of dynamic dispatch (the devil) the code uses. If it's more than one, the code is so unreadable as to be worthless to try to read. - "Know the internals […].", same as above. - "Syntactic sugar is usually bad." Depends how much more intuitive the sugar is than the salty version. Still the same opinion nowadays. - "While rare, sometimes it's a problem with the compiler. Otherwise, it's always DNS." Disagree both as a newbie and now, but then I'm probably not working on anything similar to OP. - "Some programmers are 10x more efficient than others." Certainly I was a <1x programmer as a newbie, but I don't think I've ever seen a 10x programmer. I've seen programmers which get features "done" by committing so many programming horrors that we were still dealing with the tech debt years later while they were at a FAANG, and I've also seen programmers which can whip up excellent code quickly but are unable to treat colleagues as adults. - "There's no correlation between being a 10x programmer and a 10x employee (maybe a negative one)." I wouldn't have thought so as a newbie, but this rings true now. Visibility, agreeing with the boss on whatever they think is cool, being able to serve up banter on request, and joining all the "social" events are important because nobody is able to gauge programmer productivity yet. - The "Heptagon of Configuration" is an interesting observation which I don't think I ever agreed with, but for different reasons. As a newbie because for most systems whatever we were using was usually decent enough, and now because I don't think this trend is cyclic but instead chaotic. We go from environment variables to Bash to INI to flags and so on. Usually this change is because we adopt some language or framework which staunchly refuses to treat anything but the Chosen Language as a valid configuration format, and so the existing configuration has to be adapted to work with N+1 opinionated (for the wrong reason) systems with as little pain as possible.