I should have said this is from my 20 years of experience in an IT department. And as a response to my second point, it was in reference to technical problems that you see in an enterprise environment. I though you were directing your questions to technical knowledge not business/arguments/political competitions, my bad.
I think everyone has the capacity to be a quick thinker.
The two main components to being a quick thinker are not what you think.
The first one is a competitive spirit. If you have ever played any sports and you
have felt the desire to win, this will get you half way to thinking quickly. Train yourself
to be able to look at the problem and give up many different possibilities rather than just the smoking gun fix.
Sometimes in a enterprise environment fixing the smoking gun is the most inconvenient. Being under pressure and
using the competitive spirit can be one of the most satisfying jobs.
The second one is know your environment. You have to know your environment from
top to bottom and everything in between. You have to be able to visualize the problem
from inside and out in order to narrow the problem down to its core. The first thing you do
at a new job is to find the documentation for everything and study it.
This vision of the environment could come from many different crafts whether it is a Network Engineer,
Software Developer, DBA, or Systems Engineer. But you have to be in a position of knowledge about the entire infrastructure.
In order to recall knowledge/experiences from memory quickly you have to be an expert pattern matcher. Sometimes its a new
problem that has never been discovered or documented but very rarely. Search google for the main topic and if you find a gazillion answers
you know its a common problem. If you cant find anything you know someone has changed something or broke something and is more than likely
a misconfiguration. How do you gain the knowledge in the first place? Reading. Reading books and blogs and stack overflow and everything you can get your hands on.
You wont retain all the knowledge but you will remember that you found a fix for it at one time or another and can search for it again quickly.
Congrats to the Tmux team for a great open source tool. Its sad that HN decided to take this moment to talk about sourceforge and not the product announcement.
Stay away from the TV. Stay away from anywhere you can fall asleep. You don't need sleep. You need to do something that lets you talk to your inner voice like mowing the lawn, exercise, walking, riding bikes whatever. Talk to your inner voice about your goals and dreams and who and what you love. Spend time with family or loved ones. Call in sick to work.
A MBP running OSX is almost as good as a Linux laptop but with a better GUI. Just be happy they didn't give you a windows laptop. In the corporate world you would have to be a unicorn or rockstar to get a MBP. If you were a Linux sysadmin you might get away with running a Linux laptop but very doubtful. I love my Linux and my iMac 27inch no problem running brew to install things on OSX. Your MBP will be able to run vagrant and virtual-box which is Linux anyway.
Build tons of websites with just basic HTML/CSS then when you can drop code on demand and build a website without looking everything up learn javascript inside out like your life depends on it. Do not learn JQuery yet. Wait till you are a guru at Javascript before moving on to frameworks. Yes you have to learn the javascript frameworks. My suggestion would be to learn backbone.js , require.js, then when you get really good at the MVC give angular.js a shot.
This link will take you to a roadmap to learning javascript the proper way.
Dude you got this. Just break out the books, the videos and start brushing up on everything like you were back in school. Find out what technology stack they use and start building lots of side projects. No days off. You want the answer to the question on the tip of your tongue. Act like a senior engineer and you will be one. Give it 120%. Good Luck.
Always be looking for a job. Always be interviewing. Because recruiters are whores your boss will find out. Just tell them that you are looking for a part time job. Schedule all your interviews during lunch or after work.
Break out the resume and polish it up. Use all 8 hours a day to find a job while at work. Connect to recruiters on LinkedIn and use every job search engine to get yourself out there. Resign on the 29th day. You will be penalized for 2 weeks of unemployment but it will be worth it. Good Luck.
A college degree is worth one year of experience at most companies. If you are new to programming and have no experience someone with a college degree will have an advantage. However, if you are able to get some experience and work at a job for 2 to 3 years, you will be ahead of the college grad. Pay is the same with our without a degree. The only thing you will need a degree for is if you want to get into management. If someone is paying for school go ahead and go just for the experience.
For work: Stealing The Network, The complete series collectors edition