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Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

It requires:

+ At least moderate technical skill, which is acquired thru study and experience.

+ Significant domain knowledge (understanding of the problem being solved), again acquired thru study and experience.

+ Sufficient familiarity with the organization you're working in to know what you can and can't get away with, acquired thru social interaction.

+ Ability to find unexpected better solutions to things. Unless someone's figured out how to teach this, it just requires lots of practice with good feedback.

The only "in your nature" here, is whether you find these things interesting enough to put in the required study/practice time.

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Training is perfunctory, but method of acquisition may be atypical. The personality type is not limited to computer science. Obviously it has a larger scope...

I think trying to control the variable is optimistic or unethical. It is kinda a black swan. It seems like you would require substantial behaviour modification and would mess with the wolf to soldier ratio.

If you want a great read, check out Leadership by Gen. Hillier. There is an entire chapter on this.

I think the key feature of a "wolf" as described here is a willingness to ignore the official leadership and management structures. That is definitely something that has a string built-in component.

Maybe test social conformity. Mind you the second you do, well people will game it

There are people who put the study/time and get no results.

What differentiates those people from the success stories? Misdirected effort? Too much on the lone wolf side of things so they never get feedback (and thus misdirect their effort)?

One of my great fears is putting in the study/time and getting no results.

This is at least a somewhat divisive view, but I think that it's to a large degree straight up aptitude.

Some people are good at some things. They pick them up quickly, flesh out their skills quickly, and apply those skills well in an almost intuitive way. You can call this "intelligence," but some people will be very intelligent in other ways, and have no aptitude for a particular skill.

Maybe the aptitude is innate in your biology, maybe it's the result of nurture in your childhood, maybe it's even somewhat learnable as an adult, I don't know, but when you teach people things, some of them pick it up and apply it well, and others are much slower.

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