> I've always been a very good / fast reader, which has been incredibly useful in my programming career. I had a good SAT math score (710) but got a perfect score (800) on the SAT verbal (in the late 90s).
This is me and also many of the CS students in my cohort, and AFAIK something that universities actively selected for, and students also self-selected around in an era of RTFM/MUDs/IRC before LLMs or youtube. The best programmers I've worked with are still always very linguistically brained.. polyglots even when they didn't have to be, or with a long track record of engaging with difficult literature. If nothing else.. just very witty in that certain way that's meta-cognitive, meta-linguistic.
This is still true I think but it's much harder see out in the wild due to the degree/career trajectory popularity. Plus as long we're optimizing for leet-coding even though built-from-scratch algorithms are a very rare need compared to skills with good design/exposition.. naturally the math-brain is favored.
Remember people whining about weak ecosystems? That's a lot of opportunity to build things from scratch instead of making another - for real this time - IRC clone with Electron.
This is me and also many of the CS students in my cohort, and AFAIK something that universities actively selected for, and students also self-selected around in an era of RTFM/MUDs/IRC before LLMs or youtube. The best programmers I've worked with are still always very linguistically brained.. polyglots even when they didn't have to be, or with a long track record of engaging with difficult literature. If nothing else.. just very witty in that certain way that's meta-cognitive, meta-linguistic.
This is still true I think but it's much harder see out in the wild due to the degree/career trajectory popularity. Plus as long we're optimizing for leet-coding even though built-from-scratch algorithms are a very rare need compared to skills with good design/exposition.. naturally the math-brain is favored.