Natural Geek
One of the advantages I have with my job is that I am a natural geek. A lot of the time I just see the answers to programming problems without having to go through the arduous task of working each part out bit by bit. If you were to ask me how I arrived at an answer I couldn’t tell you. The downside of this is that my hit rate is not 100%, sometimes I see an answer, run off and code it up only to find I’ve forgotten to take some small, but important fact into account. Net-net I’m no faster than your average programmer who diligently works through a problem and finally arrives at a working solution. Yes, I’ve seen to solution and coded it up twice as fast as them, but hell, if this is solution #3 I’m behind.
The upside is my brain never really stops working on a problem and I can literally dream about solutions. Take yesterday. I had to run a test which, while I managed to hack it about to work, wasn’t working the way I intended. Given the state I was in there was no way I was going to be able to work the problem through logically and no solution sprang to mind. Rather than bang my head against a brick wall I gave up and decided to wait for today (when my collegue would be in to offer possible insights) or tomorrow (when there would be people who know far more about this stuff that I do in the office). No need. Had myself a nerdy dream last night, woke up knowing the answer. It’s actually quite simple, but given the amount of tramadol I’d taken yesterday I could just about tie my shoes (and they fasten with velcro) and, given a run up, basic tasks, like eating, were manageable. there was no way I was going to do anything as complex as ’simple’ though.
Even when I’m not ill I get flashes of inspiration from dreams, or just nowhere which is why it’s vital that us natural geeks be allowed to ’slack off’, as the rest of the world so cruelly puts it. We’re on the job 24×7, jut sometimes we need to offload the problem to another part of the brain to mull it over (hell, even House does it, and he saves lives… in a ‘doesn’t really exist and would never be allowed to practice medicine in he did‘ type way).
So there you go, I’m convinced, I’m pretty sure I’ve got you lot convinced, now I just need to convince management. “I’m not asleep, I’m brainstorming with my subconscious”. 
I have been known to work in my sleep #ashamed# but I’ve never been able to make a justifiable case for ‘billable time’ for these hours.
I must admuit it’s great when you look at something , see the pattern and your brain just slots everything into place without trying.
Random (to anyone else but Dom) quote - just ’cause we were talking about this the other day when my brain was fuzzy and not working (and I was overdosing on Menthol Eucalyptus) - the exact quote is this :
“There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians’. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre.” - Mark Kac
And as I said then: Magicians in programming are not good
Being able to get from A-C without going through B in your head is all very good, but if no one else can follow it then the code is next to useless. Magician thinking is fine but I only do ‘magician’ code when I am deliberately being a shit (usually coinciding with me handing over some code to someone else and/or leaving a team).
*wistful sigh* Ah, <proprietory messaging product> to <wrapper around messaging library> bridge, how I piss myself with laughter every time I hear you’re being used in a production environment in a tier 1 investment bank
How I love not supporting you, how I enjoy telling people I can’t help them, and how I delight in sending emails that had the opening line of (and this is God’s honest truth): ‘Basically, you’re f*cked’. 3 days of being in a bad mood armed with nothing but an esoteric programing language, some interesting ideas in another language that just shouldn’t be allowed and an almighty grudge has caused so much pain to so many people that it just should not be legal.
P.S. NEVER piss of your developers. It’s just not worth it
Oh, and just in case tier 1 investment bank wants to get medieval on my ass for doing that… I’ve still got the email conversations where I tell everyone that it shouldn’t go into production, that it’s a proof of concept and that it’s not even been tested. Not my fault guv - I did exactly what was asked of me 
bwhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
No, really, NEVER piss off your developers