tl;dr:The chance to study what goes on in the "guts of boring, everyday systems" - how Git stores data or why pip install failed - is often ignored or circumvented. However, it's helped Ben. It's become easier to track tricky bugs, learn languages and libraries by pattern-matching, improved software design skills and provided confidence in understanding complexity.
tl;dr:"Being impatient is the best way to get faster at things. And across a surprising number of domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective." Being twice as fast doubles the growth rate of your output, which then compounds.