I have the opposite experience all the time, perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with early-career programmers. I recognise a problem and say "oh, that's a

I have the opposite experience all the time, perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with early-career programmers. I recognise a problem and say "oh, that's a maximum flow problem", then formulate and solve it in a few lines and they are amazed in similar ways as Penn describes. They're like "how do you know all these things"? And it's just like the buried cards. I've taken all this time to read books on algorithms and solve Advent of code and so on, so my whole mind is filled with these buried cards. Compare yourself to a person with no experience in software engineering at all and you will quickly understand how many you have, too.