A developer earns his bread by solving problems.

That was at the top of my resume: “I solve problems.”

On my first app out of college in 1969, I ran over 1,000 tests on one program (they counted).

The project took 6 months, on a machine I had never seen, using a language I never heard of, solving a complex mathematical model that was taught in college in a graduate level class that I did not take. It ran for 18 years without a single update. It increased the company’s share of the entire market by 20%.

Remember, only the last test counts. The number in between are irrelevant. It has to work.

Malcolm Gladwell was wrong about 10,000 hours, unless that was an average. I figured 3 to 6 months to become an expert.

I was with GM for 6 months when management was ordered to cut staff by 10 percent, usually by lowest seniority. The department heads of two engineering departments (200 engineers) told my division manager, “We don’t care who you lay off, as long as it is not Bill.”

It took my trainees about the same time. One said that she learned more from me in 2 months than in the last year and a half, which included a 6-week programming boot camp.

Much is training people how to think, not the details about coding.

There are a number of good points here.