I love that there was a moment when I realized that all these things where I could’t understand how someone could possibly figure out a trick to create them didn’t use any trick at all. It was instead just mountains of hard work.

I would spend weeks looking for the magic that would allow me to do it in hours when others would just spend the days or weeks required to actually do it.

I’m much better at making things now, and have people asking me how I manage to do that.

One of the things I like to mention to younger devs, when I pull out a solution that they think is from thin air, is that I have failed far more often then they have. I just have a good memory on how to fix my mistakes.

Those are the unicorns

society create the überman myth to keep the working class down, thinking they will never be the top of their game. the ones doing the hiring know that those putting in 18hrs a day are the unicorns, i.e. the best they can hope to find.

I’m close to one of these types and I get taken advantage of a lot and desperately wish I could turn it off. It presents in weird ways that are hard to navigate politically - often I will end up on a team and be outputting a large majority of the work, people/egos get hurt or threatened, still inevitably make the same anyway. It's never really led to any kind of career or financial success I'd have thought it would have years ago.

You are halfway there my friend. The other half is tactful self promotion. Make sure your skip levels see what you’re doing. Do a little less for your team and a little more for other teams and make sure their leads know you’re helping. Become the legend you can and it will result in much success. Output is only half the picture.

This is something I've witnessed first hand for years, and heard for others too. I tried to be smarter politically but it's eating my brain. Wasted brain power for petty anthropological issues. I bet the solution is to be surrounded by quality people but it seems rare. Also negative people will do wonder to paint anything you do as a problem until they're able to do the same.

It can depend on your manager and the growth state of company. I don’t think I get take advantage of, but I’m very productive and have been rewarded for it.

I was accidentally one of these once.

I fixed a long standing bug that was a companies top priority for several months and no one had been able to fix it. They were talking about re-writing an entire app to resolve it, at a cost of 100's of thousands of dollar, dragging the vendor over the coals etc.

I was relatively new and thought I'd take a look, ignoring all the mystique surrounding the problem. It turned out to be a simple one line fix, just a dumb oversight that anyone who bothered to understand and step through the code would have caught.

Things got a little weird after that haha. The director who had been responsible for that department started ignoring me, while I started to get pulled into look at all sorts of other peoples urgent issues, with zero context, often with a team of other people I didn't know on the call.

It was fun while it lasted, but man, I'm glad I'm no Doogie Howser MD, that shit would go to your head!

People usually don't see the history of these kind of systems.

In most cases these issues are a result of similar kind of patching of a previous similar issue resulting in unexpected outcomes. (Probably going on for years)

From my experience management often tries to ignore the bigger refactors by using inexperienced people to patch things repeatedly, meanwhile the team suffocates under technical debt and responsibilities as a result of this mentality.

Sometimes its better to stick with the dev team for long term goals instead of becoming a "management puppet" for short term wins.

> society create the überman myth to keep the working class down, thinking they will never be the top of their game

What? The distribution of talent and grit being what it is, ubermen do exist. Some people are naturally tall, good-looking, able to recite pi to the 50th digit, solve challenging analytical problems, put in long hours when necessary, and get along with the in-laws.

Of course, the ones doing the hiring probably know that such people won't stay in the position for long. But it's not a myth, and certainly not one to keep anyone down.

I can also relate - I'm a tech lead, and it just also happens to be I find programming to be an enjoyable puzzle. When my wife sticks on some TV, I'll usually scratch an itch with some problem I've spotted, or some improvement that can be made - most of our docker build time improvements are me trying out different things and finding what works - same with little QoL features.

Props to the dev of this project though - in some ways this kind of project is one of those 'magnum opus' things - not many people might know or care about it, but it's actually something to be proud of achieving.

Surely it’s a balance but I feel like relentless drive and focus might even be a little more important than raw intellectual ability.

> and he also says "It was a brutal year long journey of 18 hour days"

Which is likely an hyperbole.

But is it technically untrue if the start date and the end date are more than twelve months apart and some of the days between those dates saw 18 hours of work on the project? Arguably it could be both, not technically a lie but hyperbole nonetheless ("37h split between two days a year apart").

I agree with you, and with the comment but.. Come on, this guy is not THAT type of guy

Yeah I relate to this too. I often head into something not knowing what to do, taking the naive approach, realizing there's some patterns I can tool out and simplify, and refine my process. Basically just chewing through the problem. Frankly I've never met a project I couldn't finish. Since I'm not really that talented, it's the thing that gives me the confidence to tackle something.