It seems to me that many of the people we see as great programmers are those who made their mark on a particular field of programming. So my answer would be, if you’re already an okay programmer (can get hired at Google or a hedge fund), you could pick a subfield that intensely interests you, and just dive as deep as you can.
The reason most people don’t do that is most jobs have a mismatch between what’s interesting to you and what’s useful to the employer. It’s worth trying to minimize that mismatch and get encouragement from your employer somehow, though I have no idea how, it seems to mostly depend on luck.
It seems to me that many of the people we see as great programmers are those who made their mark on a particular field of programming. So my answer would be, if you’re already an okay programmer (can get hired at Google or a hedge fund), you could pick a subfield that intensely interests you, and just dive as deep as you can.
The reason most people don’t do that is most jobs have a mismatch between what’s interesting to you and what’s useful to the employer. It’s worth trying to minimize that mismatch and get encouragement from your employer somehow, though I have no idea how, it seems to mostly depend on luck.