| Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science. He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose. It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time. This was his MO. Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software… My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time. There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it. |