I've seen interns that are better than some of my 15+ year colleagues.

I'm better than most of them myself, but I've also seen interns better than me -- better problem solving skills and attention to detail I suppose. Very inconsistent correlation in terms of time spent outside of filtering people. Of course, you used to have a knowledge advantage that would hold for a bit, but intelligent usage of GPT-4 removes even that.

I'm pretty sure the whole enterprise is a combination of being gifted intellectually, with maybe a sprinkle of actual effort and abilify to sustain your attention on supremely boring tasks -- but mostly just your innate gifts at work.

When I say "better than"... well, here's my opinion: In programming, someone more talented can be up to 10x more productive at each tier of competence, shall we say. My least productive (senior and junior) colleagues are 10-100x less productive than me. My most productive colleagues (senior and junior) are probably 10x more productive than me.

This is an interesting discussion to me because I used to believe the whole tiered conception of programming knowledge until I learned that this wasn't the case through experience.

It's all just problem solving, and you're either smarter or less smart and you can't change this with even 1000 years of study.