[bitexploder]

Not if you were Richard Feynman. That is sort of the point of the article. Can or should more people be able to do this? Amusingly, Rob Pike claims some of the best programming advice he ever got was from Ken Thompson. The advice amounted to: when you are stuck, stop, think hard, and then fix the problem.

This advice could be seen as amusing rhetoric to stop and think more often.

[lloeki]

Today more than ever I witness people, professionals even, that just keep on hopefully poking and prodding back and forth in some grandiose effort to maybe just somehow break things back up into working order, which makes me very sad because all that is required is to step back, relax, and just genuinely look at things with your mind.

In that situation I'm always reminded of Feynman's "He fixes radios by thinking!", and that, if anything, we should teach people how to think instead of shovelling massive amounts of pre-baked recipes into their head.

> And all the time, on the way to his house, he's saying things like, "Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios-you're just a little boy!"

> I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can happen is that [so and so...]

> So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!"

> I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the tubes out, and reverse the order [because so and so...]

> So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up, and then plays perfectly-no noise.

> He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!"

> The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio - a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it-he never thought that was possible.

[rothron]

A variation I've heard is "Don't just do something. Stand there!"

[bitmage]

This is something we try to instill in our new ops people. If you don't understand what's going on, don't do anything. There's nothing to be gained by quickly applying the wrong solution.