That said, I’ve gotten “lucky” enough times that I think I know how to optimize for finding it.”
Pro tip: No, you don’t.
I’m game to explain it over coffee to the author, who seems to be in the Bay Area, but this writing reads a lot like someone who just started to scratch the surface on abstract learning and metacognition while thinking that it’s a wildly new discovery.
It’s hard to hear/read the reenforcing recitations of new-to-the-(speaker/author) concepts and not see it as a slow-motion replay of a common thought process, akin to sitting in Dolores park listening to musings on democracy and governance in the age of automation... thirty minutes after a batch of pot truffles has sold out...
As a generalist/multi-whatever, let me say this: expert engineers hate the knows-enough-to-be-dangerous guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to learning that can just walk in and be conversant after reading one book. That guy is a pain in the ass know-it-all that spoils conversations, derails projects, and digs bottomless pits of technical debt.
How do I know? I was that guy when I was younger, and I’m sure I drove people nuts.
No doubt there are times when I’m still that guy, but I try to hold my tongue more now until I’m confident in what I know and openly disclose where I think I fall short.
If you can’t take that mechanism for learning and flex it down to the bottom of the rabbit hole, or if you always fall back onto the crutch of relating a complex topic to a comfortable imperfect analogue, you’re aiming to be the engineer that gets handed non-critical work or the manager that nobody wants in a meeting... Or maybe a successful founder of some kick-ass mega unicorn... sigh... whatever.
In the big companies (and Silicon Valley) I hear/see this type of thinking and self-congratulation all the time among engineers with 1-4 years of professional experience. On occasion, those engineers have the horsepower to back it up, but it’s rare. Some of that write-up resonates with how I’ve learned/worked over time, but I’d never write something so stridently confident.
Me 20 years ago?