Where did I say anything about myself? Sounds like projection or some deep insecurities if you meant it _that_ way.

If you're asking what would constitute someone being special, it would depend on the role and skillset. As I said in my earlier comment, someone who is a beast and can find and fix bugs in compilers is a rare person. Especially if that skillset can help the company save boatloads of money that can be deployed elsewhere.

There are probably only a handful of people in the world who understand and can push the AI landscape forward. A lot of them are Chinese immigrants, and yet OpenAI/Meta/etc are paying them boatloads of money.

As for remote roles, I once worked on a project where we hired some dude for like $500/hr as a contractor because he was one of the few people who knew the inside/out of postgres and oracle rdbms because we were doing some very important migration.