I tend to think of "educated" as meaning "having done this before", while do-er is someone who will maintain motivation.
Someone who thrives on novelty will be an uneducated-doer at the start of a project, then convert to an educated-apathetic after completing it. They won't be inspired to do the same thing again because it's not novel. But while it is novel, you can bet they will dedicate a lot of time to it.
Someone who thrives are familiarity will start as an uneducated-apathetic. They will get frozen due to not knowing what to do. But with guidance they can be taught what to do, then will go on to be an educated-doer. These people are happy to keep doing the same projects over and over again. They like what they know.
Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. But I'm sure most of us have worked with both types: the hyper-focused person who works 80 hours a week to get some cool PoC out the door; and the "stick to the process we have in place, please" type. Both are valuable in certain situations, and a liability in others. Carmack and Torvalds appear to be the first kind of person -- granted, I've never met them -- but they do seem to like to build amazing things, then hand them over to someone else to maintain.
I know lots of successful devs who are the latter. They crank out the same kind of code for clients project after project, and will happily work with tools like Wordpress because that's what they know and it makes them money.
Everyone knows that it's our (old people) job to say "It can't be done!"
Younger folks are supposed to be "boundary pushers," because they don't know that it can't be done. They keep trying, until they give birth to beautiful unicorns.
Has nothing to do with education, and everything to do with age and [lack of] experience.
Disrupt! FTW!
At least, that's what they tell me, while dissing my experience.
The horn on the baby is fully formed and while coming "out", a majority of the time it kills the mother and in turn dies without proper care. Only a very small percentage of unicorn mothers survive and in turn the babies. This is why unicorns are rare ;)
If a CTO asks me to do something I think is initially infeasible, that’s my opportunity to try my best to figure it out not my free pass to sit and complain about what I was assigned to do.
If it really is infeasible it’s a win win. Either I figure out how to do something nobody else could have done or I end up giving the next person tasked to take a swing a lot of info about what doesn’t work and maybe they figure it out.
you are the person I hire. I will often know there are a great many unknowns. I also may know it's not possible. But the attempt often yields its own value. Also you can very often sell a close approximation of the actual impossible thing.
John Carmack works on cutting edge technology, so he embarks on things that are already difficult and the answer is not known ahead of time. Now if you are talking about deadlines, then sure. It can be intuited if the deadline is unreasonable. There are problems out there where the answer isn't known or even close to being known without significant effort. A "Do-er" in the case is valuable because they are willing to go the distance to try things. Though I will say, its unclear why an educated person cannot also be a Do-er. Those are two independent variables IMO. I would say I'm a Do-er and I got educated so I could "do" more.
The Doer in his ignorance, will embark on a trip of endlessly trying satisfy his boss, thinking that they are making progress, but they are not.