I've long had the notion that taste is secretly the most important quality of a good developer or worker in computing technology more generally, and we only pretend other things matter so much because taste is hard to measure in an interview, difficult to quantify, and no-one knows how to teach it reliably.
Taste works well when you are in a position to receive a large amount of work that can be organised in a hierarchy according to the work's quality. We will need a lot of that in a few years.
Working up from first principles, staying on time to produce a large quantity of stuff and discovering new facts are valuable methods too. You can't get to useful work from tasting without an ocean of work to receive.
