| Often overlooked is just the breadth of experience and insight aka 'Technical Wisdom'. It took 5 years of various clusterf**s with Unicode, but now whenever I approach it, I have an intuition for the cost of string manipulation, UTF8 v 16, what's pragmatic, what is needed, what is 'overdoing it'. It's like building a deck - after you build 100 of them 'all the little details' become instinct. So if you can do that across all sorts of technologies ... then you just walk through stuff like butter. Whenever I see someone whip through something, I'm not amazed so much by talent or genius, but how they 'know so much'. It's like the academic who's read literally 1000 books and remembers a lot of it. Whether they are 10x or not really depends. Some architectural decisions make a 10x difference. Some business related decisions also make a difference. Sometimes it's not apparent until later, or never apparent. And sometimes it doesn't matter that much. Finally - I'll say that 'speed of execution' is not remotely the issue. If someone can saunter along at a reasonable pace but actually produce the 'correct thing' - that's worth it's weight in gold right there. |