It is so amazing how quickly he was able to resolve this tool. 2 weeks to build a very specialized tool AND perform the optimizations on the code. What am I doing with my life?
On the other hand: It probably seems particularly impressive because its building blocks don't happen to be in your skill set. A rule of thumb: Something is impressive in proportion to how many times you think "How did they do that?!".
In this case, if you're not already familiar with disassembly, binary instrumentation, how caches work, etc, then every step along this way sounds magical. But to a low-level/systems programmer, this sort of thing is their bread and butter. So their reaction wouldn't be "OMG how did he even...?" - it's probably more like "Niiiiiiice".
(If you are, eg, a web developer, you probably have an equivalently ridiculous level of background knowledge about the internals of 5+ levels of the web stack, and how each goes wrong. I have seen systems guys - people who would jump on this project in a heartbeat - take one look at modern web dev and flee with their head in their hands, asking "how do they know all that stuff?!")
https://deplinenoise.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/webtoolspos...
My experience has been that people who are good at the bottom layers of the stack are good with the top layers of the stack, too. And if they're unfamiliar, they can ramp very up quickly.
My comment addresses the perception that "OMG programmers today know nothing; this is what a Real Man looks like". Someone learning web development has spent a lot of brain-space on learning a level of in-depth knowledge that also looks magical to someone who hadn't.
As it happens, I too think that the things you learn lower down the stack tend to make you a better engineer, whereas what you learn higher up the stack is too often an unedifying schlep. High-level systems spend a lot of complexity solving problems created by the layer underneath. (This goes 10x for web frameworks.) Low-level systems are more tightly constrained by the boundaries of the possible, so they spend their complexity on more fundamental problems. The same amount of time and intelligence spent learning the ins and outs of Angular yields less transferable skills than learning how compilers work. But if you need to build a web startup, compiler expertise on its own won't help you.
It's like learning physics vs biology. Sure, physics is more fundamental, and a physicist learning biology usually has an easier time than the other way round. But a research biologist has also spent their time acquiring an immense amount of expertise, and fundamentally we need medical advances more directly than we need confirmation of the Higgs boson.
Completely serious question/request: I'd be hugely interested in psychology hacks/ideas that short-circuit the brain (safely) to remedy this "thinking anti-pattern".
I think self-worth and confidence might be buried in the answer - I don't know if this is my own bias (depression?), I can't help but think that there's the tiniest edge of "I'm not worth learning this", which snowballs in a big way. Lack of confidence would be an obvious blocker though.
I'm not saying that programmers are getting worse--actually wait, no, that's what I'm saying (myself included).
You work hard when your job is your hobby, passion, and profession.