It doesn't necessarily have to be attributed merely to raw intellect, but denying it isn't in line with reality.

Having worked at many different companies you can definitely see how certain cultures, problem areas and technologies attract people with distinct intellectual bents and how that impacts development velocity.

How much these talented people can leverage their skills is still dependent on the organization, but pretending those differences aren't out there or that you can't hire for these profiles is naive.

One of the telling things is the people in the studies reluctance to take on hard assignments as it would damage their reputation. Most great programmers are the exact opposite.

These are the big quotes that tell me to ignore this one for developers / engineers: "The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around."

"Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer."

Geniuses and high achievers are exulted for the hard work or natural ability which sets them apart from the rest. Their superiority is widely accepted and valued, while the inferiority of the rest who can't or won't achieve as much is implied.

The puritan work ethic that's very common all over the US also contributes to this attitude. If you don't work hard, you are widely considered to be morally deficient.

The interesting thing is virtually everyone is inferior in ability, talent, or effort to someone else (even in their own specialty). The 99% aren't as good (by whatever metric) as the 1%, and even the 1% aren't as good as the 0.1%, etc. But few will openly admit their inferiority (especially at interview time), and many are eager to find faults in others.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm far from the best at what I do. I long ago realized that in order to be really, really good at what I do, I'd have to sacrifice a lot of my life, and I did want a life outside of work. As a result, my resume, accomplishments, and skills aren't as great as someone who has made those sacrifices. I pay for that in not being as good a candidate for top positions in the field, and in not being able to perform as well.

I'm also sometimes just not that interested in working on whatever widgets my company is churning out, or in their revolutionary transformations of whatever field they're conquering, and I just want to go home to do the things that do manage to grab my interest at the moment.

I confess that sometimes (even often) I am just working for the paycheck. If I had it my own way, I wouldn't work at all, and just pursue my own interests, independent of whether some company wants me to do that or not. But I'm forced by economic necessity to work.

Does this make me a bad person?

The truth is that eccentric geniuses aren't all that hirable, despite their genius. After all, Steve Jobs got fired. If you can't be relied upon to turn in results, you're a potential liability. It might be better to hire someone with less genius and more predictability.

That's not to say that there are no jobs out there for eccentric geniuses- maybe they just have to be in charge (see Steve Jobs again), or just work by themselves. But I don't think we can argue with hiring managers who don't take on a risk. The distribution of responsibilities means they wouldn't get any of the credit if the employee turned out to be fantastic anyway.

This makes sense to me from a range of perspectives. A simple example of this --too simple, yes-- is when I hired an EE out of Intel. I was looking for someone to take on a range of responsibilities. He claimed he could do what I needed. After hiring him I started to realize he had been "creative" in the profile he painted for me. It turns out he had only worked on power supplies at Intel. And by that I don't mean full product cycle. He designed them. On paper. Never even ordered a single part. Never laid out a PCB, etc. It was bad. I ended-up having to be "Professor Martin" and teaching him a bunch of stuff. Not a good outcome. Great guy, just didn't work out in the end.

In sharp contrast to this, I worked with people in the motion picture industry who were nothing less than amazing. One guy had a degree in music, he had studied to be an opera singer. He self-taught software and hardware development, mechanics and all kinds of other things. He ended-up building and owning on of the most well-known visual and special effects companies in Hollywood. The people he hired had similar eclectic backgrounds.

It was very interesting and revealing. This experience definitely opened my eyes and mind and, honestly, made me less of an elitist dick when hiring people. I could not care less what degrees someone brings through the door. I have learned this has no relationship whatsoever with creativity and raw job performance. What you are looking for is the ability to learn and what they have done in the last n years. That's it. A non-asshole who is driven to learn difficult things can run circles around almost any degree. Frankly, part of it might be that they have to in order to survive.

Of course, there are regulated industries where you have to hire degrees due to liability exposure. Medical is an simple example of this. Self driving cars might be another. If you sued and the lawyers discover critical staff doesn't have university degrees it could be a royal mess (or, at the very least, cost a ton more money to defend technical decisions).

In other words, there's an industry-dependent bias that might favor one or the other.

1. Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE [...] You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.

2. Do we know how to cultivate wisdom? Yes we do.

I agree with the second statement, and its implications are huge. If we give people good education and good role models, that people are going to be wiser.

I don't agree with the first statement. There is still a lot of prejudices against software developers and other high skilled professionals that are part of America's culture. It correlates high IQ with low creativity. Can't high IQ people learn wisdom? Is not part of the second thesis that it can be taught?

The best example I have against the first thesis is how developers behave at the companies that I have worked for. These are Swedish companies that value collaboration, personal live balance, and other social skills. People at this companies are social, technically brilliant, they participate in team building activities, we go for beers together, there is more gender parity (but still is very low), etc.

If a company values and rewards this values day to day, people are social animals and behave as such. If a company asks developers to work weekends and has no vacation time. Are you surprise to find only angry, non creative, non social people?

You keep making claims, then reliable data is presented to refute these claims, which you ignore, and pile up more unsubstantiated claims.

Most recently in this thread, you claimed:

> Their are around 1.17 million programmers in the US, that’s far from an elite field.

I showed by official BLS data that this means only 0.7% of US workers are programmers, and it can thus certainly be considered an "elite field", and employers can certainly limit job offers to high-IQ candidates. You just ignored that and proceeded to make absurd more absurd, patently false claims:

> Any profession that wants to attract 1+ million people simply can’t be that selective.

An absurd claim, demonstrating complete ignorance of statistics.

If I have to choose 1m out of 1.5m, I can't be very selective.

If I have to choose 1m out of a work force of 162m, then I can certainly be very selective.

It no longer makes sense to resume this discussion.

I think the point here can be strengthened by removing the issue of "weird traits" entirely. The simple reality is, if you are hiring someone to be very, very smart in their field, at a world-class, there is literally no one who can just parachute in and replace them, level, you need to minimize the amount of other things they have to do in order to operate at that level.

Why hire a world-class irreplaceable expert to do anything if you're going to require them to spend 90% of their time doing things other than being a world-class irreplaceable expert? Even if the expert is the nicest person in the history of humanity, it's still a complete waste if you can't support them and they have to do all this other stuff just to be allowed to function as a world-class expert.

In local parlance, this is no different than hiring a senior engineer and then 100% filling their schedule with meetings. Or expecting to hire a unicorn that is an expert in seven distinct languages and is also a manager and a high-level sales person. If I put that job listing out HR would laugh and send it back to me. Essentially making "world class scientist AND good manager AND expert sales/politician" the baseline for functionality in the sciences is just a recipe for futility.

There doesn't even have to be a correlation with "weird traits"; even a population-average distribution of the ability to me a manager + politician + sales + something else is a very, very tall ask. Add back in that there are certainly good reasons that outlier personality traits are fairly likely to go with outlier skills and it just makes it worse, but it would be plenty bad enough without that.

Articles like this will perpetuate that belief. Bad soft skills? Lack of a structured lifestyle? Cannot focus? Many people will relate to these because they take effort to build.

Though Wilson touches a good point. Medium levels of intelligence is require for most jobs, even in Investing you do not need to be that bright to be "the best" in the field. Additionally, we know now that novel ideas comes from a background process in your brain that takes a lot of time and domain knowledge to develop.

When interviewers at tech companies mistakenly believe that every successful candidate has to be building atom smashers in their spare time, and especially when interviewers at tech companies unconsciously favor candidates that match what their 'stereotypical' candidate looks like, well, then you get a situation like the one described in the article. But this isn't natural or normal or a product of biology - it's just bias perpetuating itself.

What are these places?

Outside of a research lab, even if you had infinite money and hiring power, would you even want to staff a company where "where every single engineering position is occupied by a bonafide, legitimate, super-genius"?

If you're doing engineering (as opposed to pure research) the reality is that there's always a lot of unexciting work. Your super-geniuses don't care to do that, what you need is people who are smart enough, but more importantly reliable and willing to keep showing up and doing the work even when there's zero chance it puts them on track for a Nobel price (or field equivalent).

I know I am not a top 0.1% programmer and while I am solid and want to hire people smarter than me the full scope of that piece is extreme.

Nonetheless I make no apologies for wanting to hire very smart people. If a software company's ability to execute is a function of the collective intelligence of the team, it is critical to have smart people.

All the best guys!

Nonetheless I think that everyone knows what I'm saying: which is that they're are more than enough people who can both do deep technical work and wear clothes well and work a fucking powerpoint that the industry doesn't need to resort to employing nontechnical people in roles that require both, and that outside of certain verticals, someone who knows their shit but makes iffy eye contact or stutters is still a better person to put in front of the slide deck than a slick, charismatic figure with a dim grasp of the subject matter. It's nowhere near the either/or that it is so frequently presented as, and even when presented with that either/or choice I'll take the competent nerd unless I'm selling IBM z-series boxes to credit unions or something like that.

Given that OP is on the thread I'll leave it to them to clarify the point of the article, but I will point that my reference was to a classic parody of this whole "good with people" trope that was already darkly funny long before pervasive cloud services, the vastly increased prestige in software engineering roles, exploding FAANG engineer salaries, and all the other things that have people with the right look signing up for CS classes in droves [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi25sLQ_t-k

Before joining this company, I hired and managed teams across various startups. I don't think I would be speaking out of turn to say in every company we looked for aptitude and intelligence. I don't know what my previous or current colleagues literal IQs are, but you know a highly intelligent person when you meet and work with one.

Through my entire FOUR MONTH interview process, I met a dozen people, all of whom would be considered highly intelligent. Maybe I am naive to assume that's what that interview process was designed for.

And to be clear, those folks I interviewed with and many other people around me are highly intelligent. But the people I work with on daily basis, whom I did not meet in my interview, are categorically less intelligent and honestly at the root of most of the problems I've dealt with since starting.

Sorry if it is rude, but I think it's an honest depiction of the situation.

Today we have data scientist and research scientist roles. While some data scientists are glorified data analysts, most of them do exclusive R&D work.

This has since created a divide between two types of "rockstar engineers". One type falls to the left side of the Dunning Kruger Effect. They can't understand why everyone else is so stupid. They have a large ego, and they think they're better than everyone else. Then there is the other group, one who specializes in difficult tasks that require a deep domain knowledge. Because of this prerequisite so it can be hard to share work with others, unless they also specialize in that domain.

While at first blush the two groups look similar, they're quite different. One advertises themselves as super, has a huge ego, but really they've just taken on too easy challenges. Then there is the other group, who secretly is quite anxious about their own abilities, because of the massive technical challenges they face and have seen. They learn healthy communication and team skills, because what they are doing is so complex they have no other choice. They may at first not appear like a team player, but it has more to do with the nature of their work.

This is why it is encouraged that management push the rockstar types into more and more challenging R&D type technical roles, which has the nice side effect of shrinking a large ego. Today this means encouraging them move to research roles or data science type roles. No longer are they top dog when this happens. All of a sudden there is a world of challenge beyond what they can comprehend. It's like taking a straight A high school student and dropping them into a good university. Suddenly they're challenged to do more and go beyond what they knew was possible. And best of all, it gets them out of dev circles where team work is a stronger prerequisite. However, this assumes they're actually a rock star driven to be the best at something, not just the first group with a frail supersized ego.

For a long time I couldn't pin down why this stuff bugged me, but I think I finally have it: it considers people to be static and one-dimensional. Because hey, there's no way the people who are expert/genius/10x could fall off the wagon, or stop keeping up with the field, or have kids, or burn out, right?

And similarly, the reverse is also true - is it impossible to train people to be better at their jobs? Are successful startups a magical place where a couple brilliant people come together and after that, a company can never hire that level of brilliance again?

There was another article a week or two ago that spent some time discussing how software tends to be 80% reading/maintenance work and 20% (maybe) greenfield work, and how optimizing for readability, durability, easily understood code and the like is better for the long-term health of a project/company than flashes of brilliance. And I'd guess that as your product scales and matures, shipping quickly becomes more difficult because more work has to be done to prepare things; quality expectations have changed; interfacing with and matching existing components functionality becomes a bigger part of the process. Saying stuff like "we lost our most brilliant people and now things are falling apart" feels like an excuse and an organizational failure to me, rather than a talent problem.