How to get rid of every highly-skilled-but-unmedicated neuroatypical developer (could be people like Xe Iaso or Soatok):
> hiring someone who is a good coder, but has trouble reasoning about systems, has no patience for working through hard problems with others, and can’t break down vague requirements into tangible action items.
Why not hire the excellent developers for the highly-technical skills they bring, and match them with architects/product managers who are the ones who have the big picture? Am I crazy to think like this?
You're looking at the forest, OP is looking at the trees.
No. There is this persistent belief in the industry that programmers should be good at everything, not just programming itself: communication, product management, design, sysops, UX, coaching, management, testing and so on. The most visible product of this belief was the once hyper hyped role of “full stack” developer.
The really is that you could have experts in each area doing what they’re good, which means letting programmers actually program most of the time, and let business analysts figure out requirements, product owners decide features, designers decide UX and design, QA perform in-depth testing… sure , every programmer will have to manage some of this themselves to not get blocked the whole time waiting for someone to decide something, but that is NOT the same as just having programmers handle everything!
I think that if you only ever hire programmers who are also kind of people person, you definitely have to accept missing out on the antisocial but genius ones who are very likely the only ones capable of tackling the really hard problems! Unpopular view, I know, but it takes a certain type of person to achieve excellence in some areas. Just look at the most successful artists, writers, actors and especially CEOs. Programmers are clearly in that category. I’ve seen “normies” trying to write a little code. They don’t last an hour before they decide it’s bullshit that you need a semicolon precisely placed for the code to not explode, or that they can’t compile on this system until you’ve installed some tool chain that requires a bunch of commands no one knows by heart but you just need to make sure to follow exactly, otherwise hell may break lose.