[hinkley]

I think it's two sides of a coin here. When someone asks me how I fixed some obscure bug or crazy performance issue, I will say something like 'I was the last one to give up on it'.

You could also say that many other people looked at the same thing and either didn't give a shit, or they weren't willing to continue suffering toward the payoff at some point.

Is that tenacity? Curiosity? Some of each?

[balabaster]

Usually this is a combination of thousands of hours learning to understand how things work and how they break under certain circumstances. Once you get to a certain point, your ability to make the mental leap from the symptom to the cause can just be a feeling in your gut that seems to lead you uncannily to the right place, but you discount what it took to get you there. Is it tenacity that mean you were the last one to give up on it or is that just stubbornness because "fuck this shit, I'm not going to be beaten by a fucking computer!" <- That's me.