I too have 10 years of C++ development under my belt, also in HFT, but this was from 2003-2013. I do find it easier to understand and solve a lot of problems by

I too have 10 years of C++ development under my belt, also in HFT, but this was from 2003-2013. I do find it easier to understand and solve a lot of problems by going one level lower than most developers (TCP packets, call stack, heap memory, disk blocks, CPU instructions). However, this depth, at least for me, seems to come at the expense of breadth of knowledge of different technology offerings and the best way to apply them. E.g. I could write a queue from the ground up, but I don't know enough about the features and behaviours SQS, RabbitMQ etc.