[idiocrat]

Perhaps Ken has already had spent 80 hours on a similar problem-solving, so this is why he got a smell of your problem. For you it looks like magic, because you went no same paths.

If you would spend 80 or 800 hours on some topic you will also become an expert "the Ken".

[pkolaczk]

Some people are curious and constantly learning new things. Some people don't and just do the same stuff over and over again. So the fact some people are more experienced than the others even after spending the same number of years in the industry is actually on them, it's their achievement.

I've seen a few situations where an "experienced" team of developers struggled to solve a problem for weeks and eventually an outsider, with even no prior experience with the technology stack / framework they were using, came and fixed it for them in a day. People like that definitely exist and they are not effective because they have just solved the same problem before. I think they are effective because they often learned the fundamentals (theory) properly and then they spent a lot of time in different areas. I guess there is some kind of a network effect there - if you solved problems of unrelated types A, B, C you're more likely to be able to solve a different problem D, than a person who only ever solved problems of type A.

[idiocrat]

I think of this as a "knowledge map". The more you cover the white spots on the map, by randomly probing all over the domain (i.e. years of experience), the better you can make reasonable assumptions about yet unexplored territory, connecting the dots. Monte-Carlo knowledge probing -- I cannot get all local maxima, but I have an understanding of the general topography.

[purplecats]

> Some people are curious and constantly learning new things.

the implication seems a bit disingenuous as if the curiosity and constant learning only counts if it is towards computer science.

[1123581321]

Why? I thought their comment was clearly in context of one’s job as a programmer.