Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

For a long time I was looking for the shortcut. The trick that would let me have the senior engineer’s instincts without doing the unglamorous years that build them. I read the right books, watched the right talks, and quietly hoped understanding would arrive by absorption.

It didn’t. What I eventually understood is that the thing I admired in experienced people — the way they sensed where a bug was hiding, the way a design came out right without a fight — wasn’t a secret they’d been told. It was the residue of a thousand ordinary repetitions I simply hadn’t done yet.

They weren’t smarter than me. They’d been wrong in more ways than I had, and they remembered every one. Every scar was a rep. Every outage was a rep. The reps were the whole thing, and there was no version of the story where I got the outcome without them.

That was strangely freeing. It meant I could stop hunting for a hack that didn’t exist and just do the next boring repetition, and the next, trusting that they were quietly compounding into the instinct I wanted.

I don’t look for the shortcut anymore. The reps are the shortcut. There was never another road.

– Serguey Asael Shinder