[wutbrodo]

Fully agreed. My model of engineering productivity (wrt specific tasks like hiring and working with colleagues) has a pretty large coefficient on individual talent, but I was looking to learn from a dissenting view.

Unfortunately, while the article is pretty well-written, it's comprised of naked assertion after assertion, with no attempt at justifying them.

Not to mention the non sequiturs: even if you accept that we're born blank slates and anyone can be nurtured to any level of (non-physical) achievement, that's only relevant to hiring if companies were buying infants and grooming them for their precise employee needs they'd need in 20 years. In reality, timing matters, and someone who can't be as productive today but will blossom into a productive flower given enough time carries higher costs and higher risks to the employer than someone who meets the mark on day one. In fact, I'd personally call this explore/exploit trade-off the defining struggle of my career: implicit negotiations with my employer over how much unprofitable education they're they're willing to implicitly give me (by allowing me to work on things relatively far from my competency) in exchange for doing work I'm already highly-skilled at (and often bored by), all while compensating me well.

I hate how mean-spirited this inevitably sounds, but so much of the discussion around talent's role in engineering that I've seen (largely on HN) falls apart upon the slightest scrutiny and I can't shake the feeling that I'm just dealing with a mountain of cope. I firmly believe that talent isn't everything, and further that there are many who overstate the innateness and immutability of "talent". But "talent isn't everything" is leagues away from "talent doesn't exist", and lazy analysis doesn't justify lazy analysis in the opposite direction.