Great mentors help, but purposeful tinkering and grit tend to forge the strongest software engineers.The Classroom Myth Formal education is valuable, but it is optimized for scale. It distills messy practice into neat sequences that fit a semester. Those recipes create useful proficiency, yet they rarely cultivate the intuition needed when the recipe breaks at 3 a.m. on prod. "Purposeful Tinkering" was defined by Nassim Taleb as mastery through repetitive continual error correction: repeated cyc...