Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I think an intermediate level of mastery is when you realize that a computer is a logic machine built to serve humans and it will always listen to you if you're willing to put in the effort. You can always go a level deeper. Great engineers know all of the tools at their disposal and will bend the computer to their will if they need to.

I've worked with some people who definitely seemed like "masters", and this was true of all of them. Quiet patience and an unshakeable belief that this thing is going to be fixable, even after trying multiple things that have gone nowhere. And they're almost always proved right.

It also made me realise I need to get out of this business as soon as possible, because I'm the polar opposite. After a few failed attempts my brain goes into panic mode and the problem seems insurmountable. Then I "wake up" an hour later after a bout of procrastination, no closer to a solution.

I often wonder about the chicken and egg of how people attain this state. Are they first and foremost technically brilliant, and the confidence emerges from that? Or is it more of a personality type that has allowed them to solve lots of problems and become technically brilliant along the way?

I had a similar experience early in my career. To me it was eye opening to see some masters keep investigating problems without getting emotional. I learned how not to care about the time it takes to figure things out, but to start and carry on. This way given enough time, almost all problems are solvable. The time pressure doesn't change this fact.

In case of a time pressure, I just focus on workarounds instead of analysis. Once the problem is no longer burning, it's up to the project priorities to investigate the root cause.

I also learned that panic never solved any of my problems, so when I notice that I am moving into panic mode, I stop for a minute and cool down. This is a skill that can be learned.

It’s more a type of persistence I think. More junior people often ask me something along the lines of “How do you immediately know these things?”. But the answer isn’t anything magical. Generally one of:

1. I’ve run into the same or similar problem before.

2. I wrote the code that does this thing.

I only occasionally achieve this state but I find that it comes from high levels of comfort with the systems you're using. That's everything from the operating system to the programming language to your chosen editor/IDE.

When you have a high level of comfort with all of these things when you see a problem you can often guess *where* the bug is and that's half the battle right there.

Have you ever noticed that your friends will ask you to fix their WiFi or an app on their phone and even though you have no real expertise you can normally do it? That's a version of the same thing. You understand the general principles of the system and you're able to guess the general location of the problem and start flipping switches until it goes away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com