[buro9]

This feels semi-normal to me... just have the curiosity to ask "why?" and the bias-to-action to move to "I'm going to find out".

You encounter far far more dead-ends than anyone ever says, and every unsolved mystery is a mild nerd snipe, an open case, that years from now you'll see someone else explain something you realise it answers that question from years prior.

For me, the hard bit is not over-indexing on this... you learn things, but biasing too much for them is a sure fire way to over-engineer or increase complexity to the point where something is now worse for you knowing something. But once in a while that tiny thing you learned years before is a 20% savings across the board with associated performance increase and everyone wondering how on Earth you could possibly have made those jumps.

Also related... incidents. "Why" and "I'm going to find out" is the best way these things don't recur in future. A high degree of observation and understanding is a happy engineer life as it can improve what can often be the most stressful parts of the work (on-call, etc).

That XKCD comic about everyone learning something for the first time factors too... there is stuff you know that others do not, share it.

[djtango]

I remember someone saying the difference between Physics and Computer Science is that in CS we are the masters of the universe - there are no laws of Physics that bind us.

For me that means that in our world of computers there is infinite curiosities to discover. (Not that the same isn't true for the natural world too)

[matwood]

> "Why" and "I'm going to find out"

And it drives me nuts dealing with people who don't think this way. I'm not a jerk about it, but my personality is 'lets what all we can figure out the why'.

[totetsu]

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png for those who haven't heard of it.

[Chris2048]

I always felt this one was a bit smug when applied to occupations (which it often is). People paid to do a job should know the basics of that occupation.

[teddyh]

Canonical link: <https://xkcd.com/1053/>