Some days I feel almost smart…
I’m a technical worker. I think that the more generic term for my kind of work is “knowledge worker”, but whatever you call it, my stock in trade is generated by my gray matter.
I am not a genius: far from it, in fact. Every complex thing I figure out takes a tremendous amount of effort on my part. I’m good at seeing correlations: logical interactions or the like. But that doesn’t mean that I just pick up a book and instantly understand something. I really wish I did.
Part of my work involves designing and writing computer software. I come from an era when it was actually possible to understand a programming language more or less completely. I develop in several language frameworks these days, but even the simplest of them seems to me to be beyond the capabilities of one person to truly understand.