I've probably blogged about this previously, but I'm too lazy right now to search.
I've determined one crucial thing about good older programmers - they are not at all afraid to exit the programming language and use the system around it.
I have been helping a junior programmer with some tasks - he inherited a program partially built, and I was one of the builders. It's a multi-program system, with data being processed by a number of Python and C programs in sequence. He's been tasked with converting everything into a single program, and is having issues with getting the data from some steps into the next ones.
Where the box is, it seems, is in trying to stay totally inside Python. He asked for my help, and my immediate answer when he described the issue, was "Just redirect the output to a file, and read that file in as the next step. It avoid having to worry about the string/list formatting"
He seemed reluctant, and eventually found the step needed to convert the data formats (which I would have done in a similar fashion, but I would not have had the initial problem for more than 3 minutes before converting the data)
So one of the skills to develop is that of seeing where the box edges are, and that they are often just lines you can cross
